I do not usually pay attention to the Met Gala, which is happening next Monday. In fact, I think the first time I was even aware of its existence was several years back, when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went wearing a white dress that had the words “Tax the Rich” on it in bold red letters.
But I happened to see a NY Times piece about this year’s event that explained that the theme is “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and the dress code is based on J. G. Ballard’s story “The Garden of Time.”
As The Times describes it, the story is:
about an aristocratic couple living in a walled estate with a magical garden while an encroaching mob threatens to end their peaceful existence. To keep the crowd at bay, the husband tries to turn back time by breaking off flower after flower, until there are no more blooms left. The mob arrives and ransacks the estate, and the two aristocrats turn to stone.
The purpose of the Gala is to raise money for the fashion wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which apparently has to pay for itself. This does not seem to be a problem: last year’s Gala raised $22 million.
It is a party where the rich and famous pay lots of money to hob and nob and many people wear extravagant costumes. Apparently the “sleeping beauties” of the theme are items from the museum’s collection that are too fragile to be displayed even on mannequins.
But it was the reference to and description of the Ballard story that really caught my eye, caught it so much that I went looking for it and fortunately my library had The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. “The Garden of Time” was first published in 1962 and was, I gather, Mr. Ballard’s first appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I have now read it twice and I still find in unbelievable that this story is inspiring the dress code for a gathering of the rich and glamorous celebrities.
I am also amazed that The Times managed to report on this without any comment beyond “Just what comes to mind when you think “fashion,” right?”
I mean, they’re using a story in which rich and elegant people are trying to stave off the masses as dress inspiration for a gala that costs $75,000 a person in a time of extreme wealth inequality. You’d expect the reporter to have noticed that.
I don’t know what Mr. Ballard was thinking when he wrote the story, but I cannot believe that he thought the people snipping off the time flowers to hold onto their wealthy way of life were the heroes.
This is a man who six years later wrote a story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” He understood what Reagan was about long before the man became president.
I couldn’t have written that Times story without at least commenting on the irony of using a story the makes the gap between the wealthy and those with nothing so obvious – not to mention one that makes it clear that the wealthy life is almost gone – to inspire a party devoted to transactional excess.
In my social media feed, more than one person commented that it would be fun to go to New York City dressed in rags and mill around outside the Gala venue. It might look like a protest; it might even double as a protest. But it would really be art. It would get at what the story is about.
Of course, given the recent extreme excesses of NYC cops that could be very dangerous. Still, if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, I’d be damn tempted to show up dressed appropriately.
One thing I noted in my second reading of the story was that the count has a “George V” beard. I looked that up, and it is indeed a reference to the type of beard worn by the British King George V, who died in 1936 (and who was also the person who changed the name of the house of the British Royal Family to Windsor because of anti-German sentiment in World War I).
The villa in the story could be anywhere and anytime in Europe. The count’s wife plays the harpsichord and favors Mozart and Bach, but that, too, is somewhat timeless.
But the beard makes me think that this is a man trying to hold onto his privileged estate in our times or in our future, not at sometime in the past.
In the end, the villa is a ruin. Perhaps the real theme of the Gala is the death throes of capitalism, whether the sponsors know that or not.