We Are The Culture
You cannot be what you seek to destroy
I live in a town where people make art. Lots of it. There are weavers and writers and muscians and dancers and people practicing pretty much every kind of art form you can think of. There’s also an implicit recognition that art is good for you, that it is something to be embraced, shared and encouraged. Just yesterday someone invited me to a fundraiser hoped to make a local school’s art festival ‘more ambitious, inclusive and rooted in a shared celebration of creativity.’ The flyer said that there will be hotdogs! Consider me sold.
On Monday New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art also held its annual fundraiser. Maybe you heard about it? It’s an event that has been chaired by Vogue Editor Anna Wintour since 1995. Wintour notoriously invites the crème de la crème of the arts world to attend the event, where people who have paid $100,000 per ticket are served food completely devoid of garlic, onion and parsley1. This year the likes of Beyonce, Lena Dunham, Anne Hathaway and Colman Domingo got all dolled up and strutted their stuff on a red carpet that looked ominously mouldly (truly there is no other way to describe it).
The big *idea* behind the gala is that each celebrity gets dressed by a designer who will have interpreted that years exhibition theme, creating a couture-level outfit in response. There are always varying levels of commitment to this brief, with some celebs taking it very seriously and others (Nicole Kidman) kinda not bothering at all. ‘Fashion is Art’ was the exhibition theme for 2026 – so there were lots of references to sculptures, impressionism and van Gogh. Kim Kardashian wore a flame-coloured breast plate designed by British pop artist Allen Jones, whilst Heidi Klum turned herself into a living, breathing statue. Overall the outfits felt mid.
I once loved watching the MET. Some years (pre-kids, obv) I even stayed up to watch some of the live stream. I think the reason I loved watching it was because of the lengths the designers would go to in order to creatively respond to the gala’s theme. The ‘Camp’ year in 2019 was probably as good as it ever got in this regard. It was the year of Rihanna’s fried-egg cape and Gaga’s voluminous pink tent, which arrived with its own entourage.
They were simpler times. Times of a bygone era.
I don’t need to tell you that this year the MET Gala has been overshadowed by the involvement of its honorary co-chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who donated paid $10 million dollars to crow-bar their way into the event. The response to the Bezoses involvement has been pretty damning, with numerous high profile celebrities snubbing the event, and labour unions organising a counter ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ gala, where smaller, independent labels dressed Amazon warehouse workers alongside workers from Whole Foods and The Washington Post. Their theme was ‘Labor is Art’, and attendees and models held signs saying ‘We Are The Culture’.
Elsewhere activism group Everyone Hates Elon projected video interviews of Amazon workers onto the Bezoses Manhatten penthouse. It featured the story of 72-year old Mary Hill, an Amazon warehouse worker living with cancer. She lives paycheck to paycheck, presumably earning somewhere in the region of $17 per hour (the average Amazon hourly wage). In exactly the same hourly timeframe Jeff Bezos is estimated to earn millions of dollars.
Just before Monday’s event Everyone Hates Elon also littered the MET venue with 300 bottles of fake urine, a reminder to those attending that Amazon workers have reported having to skip toilet breaks, pee into bottles or wear adult nappies in the workplace. ‘We think it should become embarrassing to be a billionaire. We don’t think it should be culturally acceptable’ said a spokesperson for the group in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter.
This year’s MET Gala acted as a sort of mirror of how late-stage capitalism is manifesting itself, reflecting in no uncertain terms the ability and desire of the ultrawealthy to encroach upon not just our living standards but the locale of culture itself.
But there were other dynamics unfolding. It seemed to me that there were notably fewer designers on the red carpet this year. Perhaps they were fearful of getting caught in a horrendous pap shot like the one a stony faced J.W.Anderson found himself at the centre of during Dior’s runway show in January. The absence of Zendaya and so many other big hitters is an indictment of the Bezoses desperate desire to claim the fashion world as their own.
My favourite fashion critic Luke Mahar pointed out that the discomfort people have expressed at the Bezos’s sponsorship of the MET is slightly strange, because there have always been ‘controversial very wealthy figures funding it’. He argued that was was different this time as that it was not ‘Google or Meta or Tik Tok … but Jeff and Lauren Bezos. … They’re using fashion as a vehicle to get legitimacy and get sort of social acceptance and to wear down people into recognising them as faces that are just part of the entertainment gala gambit world.’
His review of Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s somewhat basic Schiaparelli outfit reflected my feelings. ‘Why bother’ enduring all this criticism if you’re going to turn up in the same dress you’ve worn to 75 other galas? Luke has already answered this question; the reason they were desperate to ‘buy’ access to the MET Gala was not because of a genuine appreciation or understanding of fashion, but rather a desperate desire to ingratiate themselves in circles that are otherwise divorced from. What the Bezoses fail to understand is that you cannot simply acquire culture in the way you can buy yachts. Culture is formed in a complex series of processes which are influenced by a community’s response to their social environment.
Although definitions of culture are nuanced and diverse, the Colombia Encyclopedia defines it as “the integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs and rules of conduct that delimit the range of accepted behaviours in any given society.” Given this definition, we can see how the Bezoses fail to abide by so many of our societies accepted behaviours and norms. Despite giving a speech in which she claimed that ‘the designers we celebrate tonight are true artists’, the Bezoses flagrant disregard for human life and the labour rights of workers who are so fundamental to the fashion world’s existence is self-evident. They are people who will only show interest in culture once it is already deemed ‘of value’. They fail to recognise that true culture emerges both in response to and as a critique of the very capitalist structures that they profit from.
Capitalism has always been predicated on the exploitation of human labour and human beings. It destroys the human spirit and crushes the ability of true artists to flourish. Despite this, art emerges. Culture develops. Even in the cracks of an economy that seeks to asset strip anything of value. At this year’s dismal MET Gala we saw the ultimate hollow destination of where capitalism leads. It felt soulless and divorced from the art form it claimed to promote and protect.
The wider response to Monday’s MET has shown that you cannot be what you seek to destroy. Your claim on culture will be rejected, if not by your immediate peers, then by society writ-large. The same society which you seek to extort will show you the door in a multitude of creative and subversive ways.
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