We Live In Interesting Times
The Met Ball serves as a premonition not of a cursed future, but a regenerative one.
In May of 2019, (remember that pre-pandemic summer?), I travelled to Venice for the Art Biennale. The title of the exhibition was “May You Live In Interesting Times”, and in those halcyon days my naive interpretation of the title was one of joy and fascination. Many of the artists saw it differently, and there were plenty of pavilions that were to become harbingers of a more challenging and fragile future.
I was reminded of this because Anna Wintour evoked the title, (believed to be a Chinese curse), to describe the moment surrounding yesterday’s Met Gala. “We’re living in an interesting time in our political history,” she said. “Anything we can do at the museum to stand behind the Black community is of utmost focus.”
Chops to Auhn-na, because this year Wintour raised a record breaking $31m for her beloved museum, despite and perhaps because of the choice to celebrate Black creativity in fashion. The show, and I can’t wait to see it, is Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. The marginalisation of D&I and the defunding of academic institutions in the US have, it seems, lit up the pockets of those wishing to protect such values. Also, I don’t think it’s any coincedence that the rapacious super brands who normally leverage fashion’s most powerful red carpet were largely absent from it yesterday. Busy licking their wounds after falling sales, it was left to Louis Vuitton (Pharrell, the LV menswear director, was a co-chair) and Burberry, Britain’s only super brand, to snap up the $350k tables. (I’m going to cheer for this, because I’m a Brit and I love the way Burberry has been celebrating Britishness in recent months - something our beleaguered national psyche could well do with right now).