The gala and the garden

Hope Bonarcher reflects on what the outfits at the Met Gala reveal about our culture

It’s midsummer! Yet, as I am writing this, the 2024 Met Gala is all over my screens. Tickets cost a whopping $75,000 if you’re not part of the royal guard of fashion who receives an invite, and styling mishaps could see one condemned as a red carpet laughing stock throughout the rest of the year. The world’s most notorious fashion event is a perfect projection of where we are as a culture. God fashioned clothing for us way back in the garden, as a covering for our shame. How we are wearing it is a barometer of who we’ve fashioned ourselves to be millennia later. Not you and me, personally, but as a culture, the star-studded event depicts who we idolise and how they present themselves, for better and for worse. It’s a very surrealistic reality.