GoKawiilAfter many years of Silicon Valley nudging its way into Vogue's Met Gala, this week's edition marked the completion of tech's semihostile takeover of the fashion magazine's annual party to raise money for the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This year, the event's co-chairs were Amazon founder and tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, who had reportedly paid $10 million for the honor. Also in attendance were executives from Meta, Snapchat, OpenAI and others, which has ignited outrage -- especially among those who consider the Met Gala not a vulgar display of excess, but the most exclusive and stylish event on fashion's calendar.
What next? Will the 2027 theme celebrate AI slop? Will Mark Zuckerberg fund a rebrand so that next year we'll be talking not about the Met Gala, but the Meta Gala? Why, oh why, would Anna Wintour, global chief content officer at Vogue publisher Condé Nast, allow this?
There's a vast chasm between the perceived coolness of the Met Gala and the tech bros who buy tickets for a reported $100,000 a pop. But we shouldn't be surprised that the Gala establishment is embracing tech companies, in spite of behavior that many find morally objectionable (data centers gobbling up land and natural resources, social media companies turning a blind eye to harms to children, and so on). And neither should we be surprised that the Met Gala is the stage upon which Silicon Valley executives are attempting to parade their newfound discovery of the concept of taste, as documented by The New Yorker in March.
The event is nothing if not a spectacle, made even more so by the protests against Amazon that didn't just form a backdrop to the party, but threatened to eclipse its thin facade of glamour with a series of stunts designed to speak to the cold, hard realities of the company's working conditions, galvanizing collective action.
One activist group left 300 bottles of urine inside the Met -- a reference to the Amazon workers who reportedly have to complete their duties under such extreme time pressure that they have no choice but to pee in bottles. Outside the event was parked a shopping trolley full of empty bottles, marked "Met Gala VIP toilet." Videos containing protest messages were projected onto Bezos' New York penthouse.
Perhaps in light of the backlash, Bezos chose to forgo the opportunity to walk the red carpet with his wife. Meanwhile, the great and the good of the celebrity world -- Hollywood royalty, pop stars, Olympians and models -- posed for the cameras, seemingly oblivious to the clamor, perhaps choosing to look away from the protests and look past the tech bro interlopers, either so as not to offend Wintour and Vogue, or in service to their own egos.
Money and art: Forever uncomfortable bedfellows
In many ways, this is a tale as old as time. Great artists of the world have long had to accept the money and tolerate the company of wealthy patrons who, under the guise of good-hearted philanthropy, purchased proximity to their work.
People with boring jobs and lots of money are still at it. Just look at how private members' clubs such as London's Soho House, designed ostensibly as spaces for media and arts professionals to network, are flooded with finance bros and management consultants. Their corporate salaries allow them to escape their corporate environments for a while and share a stylish space with people who lead much cooler, more interesting lives.
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