The Met Gala's Hidden Metaphor
John Galliano, bombs over Rafah, antisemitism, and J.G. Ballard's The Garden of Time
‘Hold it as long as you can, my dear, until the last grain dies.’
On the first Monday in May, in the Western metropolis known as New York City, a gathering takes place at the Metropolian Museum of Art. Every year the most famous, beautiful, thirsty, and well-connected popular culture icons flock to the infamous Met Gala steps to be photographed in high fashion get-ups based on a theme.
Sometimes the theme honors a designer, like 2023’s Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, and sometimes the theme is a concept like Heavenly Bodies, Camp, or In America. The themes are always expanded into an exhibit at The Costume Institute at the Met for the public to visit and admire.
This year the theme did not go as originally planned. Er. Allegedly.
According to The Cut, “When the annual parade of celebrities ascends the steps at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday night to mark the opening of ‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,’ guests will have no indication that the elaborate exhibition they are about to see is a last-minute backup plan.”
Appparently the original plan was Galliano. John Galliano.
Once-disgraced and fired by Dior thanks to a drunken, antisemitic tirade caught on camera, Galliano has maintained closeness with Anna Wintour (editor of Vogue and chair of the Met Gala) in the years since his outburst.
According to reporting in The Cut, when Wintour and head curator Andrew Bolton chose Galliano as the theme, leadership at the museum reacted with fears of backlash and members of the board “stepped in to stop the show.”
The replacement theme became “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” in reference to garments too fragile to ever be worn again.
Perhaps due to the difficulty of homaging that which cannot be donned, Vogue announced that “The Garden of Time,” a short story written by J.G. Ballard in 1962, would compliment the theme as a dress code.
Predictably, many of the guests showed up decked out in floral inspired pieces, including Gala co-chair Zendaya who walked the steps twice in two different flower-adorned Galliano gowns making it appear that the original theme made it to the floor anyway.
Bad Bunny, another co-chair, wore custom John Galliano for Maison Margiela, while the designer himself showed up with none other than Kim Kardashian on his arm, leading multiple outlets, like The Washington Post, to herald John Galliano as the “winner” of the evening.
It has been over a decade since multiple accounts of Galliano’s antisemitic rants went public, including a 2011 video where he drunkenly tells fellow restaurant patrons, "I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.”
After the video’s release Galliano spent two years in “exile” before Wintour brokered him a temporary residency deal at Oscar de la Renta.
Even with his strong connections to Wintour, Galliano has yet to reclaim his title as one of the most revered living fashion designers. Until now.
While his exhibition at The Met is on indefinite pause, having icon du jour Zendaya repping not one but two of his designs at the biggest night in fashion suggests he has been officially welcomed back into the public realm.
‘Quickly, my dear, the last flower!’
With a style so potent that “Ballardian” has its own entry in the dictionary, J.G. Ballard is known as a science fiction author with a penchant for envisioning dystopian futures where class hierarchies come to their inevitable conclusion.
The author of High-Rise, The Terminal Beach, and The Empire of the Sun takes the same approach with this year’s Met Gala dress code inspiration 1962 short story “The Garden of Time.”
In the story, Count Axel and his Countess live on a beautiful estate with a miniature lake, pavilion, and flower garden. The flower garden, however, is no ordinary garden. Its flowers are ‘time’ flowers, and each flower plucked turns back the clock by hours or days.
Plucking the flowers to turn back time is a ritual the Count practices regularly in order to keep an angry mob of civilians from encroaching and overtaking his villa estate. Each time the army of people reaches close enough for their shouts and cries to be heard, the Count picks another flower and watches it sparkle and then extinguish, before looking up to find the mob once again receded comfortably to the horizon.
Each time he uses the flowers’ power, it seems to dwindle slightly, not warding the crowd off quite as fast as it did before. Meanwhile, the blooms do not regrow, making his hours with the Countess in their private utopia numbered.
The story comes to its conclusion after the Count and Countess, together, pick the last two flowers. But as the mob reaches the estate, the masses find it has already been lost to time, holding none of the sparkling beauty that existed when the time garden bloomed.
As the army of people swarm and throng their way through the now dilapidated property, the Count and Countess are nowhere to be found. Not their living bodies anyway. Instead, atop a tangle of thick bush in the garden, their likenesses remains in statue, with the last time flower (which Ballard now distinctly refers to as a rose) lightly clasped in the Countess’s hand.
The estate is in ruins but the statues of the Count and Countess remain intact, their icons of privilege and wealth hovering above the masses of people as they wander through the once-private grounds.
“… the army was composed of a vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganized tide.”
Bombing in Rafah, the city at the southernmost border of Palestine and the last safe haven for 1.3 million Palestinians, intensified as many of the Western world’s most popular faces and names readied themselves for the Gala, slipping on dresses and gowns, having their nails painted and hair curled.
For the guests to make their way up the steps to the party, past the shouting photographers and assistants hired for the sole purpose of rearranging dresses and lifting bodies that could not climb stairs due to restricted outfits, they would have to pass hundreds of protestors shouting and crying out for Palestine.
Inside the wealthy plucked their time flowers.
Outside the angry mob cried for peace.
As the red carpet arrivals kicked off and police began making arrests, the crowd chanted “Gaza! Gaza! Gaza” and “All eyes on Rafah!” while, according to the New York Times, some passerbys refered to the protestors as “antisemitic.”
To the best of my knowledge, the Times did not follow up with said passerbys for their commentary on John Galliano.
Ballardian
(bælˈɑːdɪən)
adjective: resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in the works of J.G. Ballard, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social, or environmental developments
All things decay in time. Or at least they are supposed to.
Unlike the “Sleeping Beauties” honored at the Met Gala, some things in our current society have not fallen prey to the hands of time.
We live in an economic system where money does not decay. In fact, money today does the exact opposite. When hoarded, money grows in value. Unlike everything in the natural world, money never rots or turns to compost. Instead it has been designed to grow and expand, at the top, indefinitely.
This unnatural design, like plucking flowers from a garden that will never regrow, cannot last forever. Like Count Axel watching the mob on the horizion, one eye to his nearly bare garden, the writing is on the wall. There is only one way this can end.
Or is there?
As crass and cruel as it may be to perform such extravagance while wars rage on and children starve and die, our moral judgement—our pitchforks at the castle walls—will not stop it. Just as Met Gala attendees are trapped in their private utopia, so too are protestors trapped in their public defiance, as the latter only exists in reaction to the former.
No matter how fast the masses advance, billionaires and politicians, corporate CEOs and war profiteers, celebrities and Met Gala attendees continue to pluck flowers—all delaying the inevitable: the mob’s arrival at the estate and the natural decay of time.
“The Garden of Time” offers a warning: Attempting to overtake the estate will not work. The elites will hold us back until the last flower is wasted. And so the question remains, What are the stories available to us outside of this paradigm?
The wealthy elite sees the angry mob approaching closer and closer, but do they know their flowers are limited?
The angry mob nears the wealthy elite’s walls, but do they know it’s already too late? That will only make it inside after the last flower is gone?
Perhaps the invitation is not to attempt to storm the castle walls or even to condemn the pluckers. Perhaps the invitation is to give up any association with the estate at all. To let go of our need to tear the state down, or our thirst for becoming the one who plucks, and to find a third space.
Quickly, my dear, the last flower…
We do not have to adhere to the dress code.
There are alternative options to the duality of living within the estate or attempting to overtake it from the outside. These places will look different than the options we are used to.
There may not be time gardens in these third spaces. There may not be exclusive events or assistants who carry fashion clad bodies up infamous museum steps. But I think there will be kindness and grace and mercy.
And I think the children will be safe there.
For now, we live in the discomfort of it all, shocked and appalled that the ruling class would be so bold as to admit to their plucking. But not really that surprised.
And we raise our voices. We speak to each other about the difference between right and wrong as we look for third spaces.
And in the absence of finding them, we build spaces of our own. First in our hearts. Then in the world. And we don’t lose hope.
We never lose hope.
Perhaps the third space is a coming together. Duality seems to be divisive by its nature: either/or, you or me. The third space could be “and.” And maybe we won’t evolve again as a species until we learn to surpass the discomfort required to remove duality’s invisible walls.
This was a refreshing read. I enjoyed the turn you took at the end. Gently and full of kindness.
The line “And I think the children will be safe there” reached me profoundly. It felt warm and hopeful.
I do believe in these third spaces. I believe in the collective power we have to build these third spaces. And I believe in the wonderful spaces we have now while we look for it.
Thank you for sharing your hope.