of the United Kingdom’s capitol city.
“Your Met Gala was very different than my Met Gala this year.” That's how Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights for CI&T, described the days leading up to fashion's biggest night. She wasn't being metaphorical.
One feed, based in suburban New Jersey, scrolled through guerrilla protest stunts: spoof commemorative merch planted in the Met store, hundreds of bottles of “urine” hidden throughout the museum, billboard takeovers shaming Jeff Bezos for enmeshing himself in fashion's most exclusive night.
Another feed, based in central London, surfaced get-ready content, red-carpet interviews, and craft-forward snaps from celebrity stylists.
This is what Minkow saw, and not much else. “I was looking at the fashion and getting the quick sound bites," she said. "We're all being fed different perspectives and different lenses.”
A single cultural event has fractured into a thousand parallel ones. Economic disparity, tech's quiet annexation of creative fields, the collapsing wall between art and commerce; it’s not unlike Richard Hamilton’s Palindrome, a lenticular painting in the collection of The Met. The image that you see depends on your unique point of view.
This scenario reflects the reality of how we collectively (and individually) consume content and participate in culture. It also illustrates how, despite there being an objective chain of events, our opinions of major news and cultural moments are being swayed by what our algorithms want us to see. And after we consume, comment, remix, and amplify, the plot mutates until it’s indistinguishable.
Different feeds become different threads that shape what we see. Minkow describes it as two distinct embroideries conjoined by the same threads.
This is the essence of the Met Gala’s (and any other over-commercialized event’s) cultural decline: when everyone is a critic, the event is not just secondary to the commentary around the event—it’s tertiary to the meta-commentary and the art produced in protest to the event.
While we can confidently say there was always drama involved in the Met Gala (what major A-list event doesn’t have it?), it was confined to closed rooms and a limited cast of characters, usually on a red carpet or in a glossy magazine. The only moments documented were a few unposed shots and whispers of post-event gossip. Today, the drama is louder, the voices are louder, and the ripple effects are longer.
Collectively, these realities have unraveled the cultural cachet of the Met Gala itself and the general public's belief in its right to exist. It has been undone by visibility and by commerce.
From Peacocking to Pandering
First hosted by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, the Gala was (and remains) an exclusive event to fundraise for the Costume Institute. The Met Gala was never for the public. It was a space for insiders, with mostly fashion insiders and New York high society on the invite list.
Peacocking, in its purest form, is a niche craft executed by specialists for specialists.
We see this in other realms, with the highest forms of craft often becoming unpalatable to the general public. In fact, the chief criticism of modern artists like Jacob Collier, Polyphia, Snarky Puppy, and Vulfpeck is that they are musicians who play chiefly to peacock for other musicians.
The Gala has always been fashion executing fashion for fashion. The fundraising piece was the official philanthropic mission, but the peacocking was the whole point.
The benefit evolved into a high-stakes industry performance where designers, editors, and stylists played to the only room equipped to judge them. By the 1970s, the circle grew to include pop culture figures and movie stars. The spectacle swelled, with media build-up and paparazzi becoming the norm, but the secrecy, overall, remained intact.
The public could watch through a keyhole, yet the semi-privacy made genuine risk-taking possible. When the only critics are peers, you can go further. You can be weirder. You can fail in front of people who praise it as part of the creative process.
While there have been small glimmers of that risk-taking, themes of the past five years have felt underserved and creatively underwhelming. A possible tipping point? When social media influencers were brought into the fray, the once very strict “no pictures” policy became a mere suggestion. On-site documentation in the form of selfies has become the standard. The air of exclusivity has shattered. And evidence of the night is on display for all to pick apart and analyze days, even weeks, later.
This makes being weird scarier. It makes “committing to the bit” feel impossible. And when the theme itself is “fashion is art,” what’s the point in going if you can’t go all in?
"I didn't think anyone did a risky job with it,” Minkow said. “There were a lot of beautiful gowns, but no one was wacky. No one was really doing anything eye-catching and groundbreaking."
For Minkow, that “muted expression” tells a much bigger story about where we are as a society.
“I don't know if it's because people are afraid, or because they don't trust their sources since we're all being fed different viewpoints, or if people are just exhausted and wanted a night of fun. But it was definitely quiet in terms of expression."
Everyone can post, clip, and score looks as attendees venture down the red carpet. Everyone is a commentator, even without the expertise. The peacocking is judged by people who don't speak the language, which completely alters the social contract originally set.
When Monetization Mutes the Mission
Once private communities become public spectacle, they become performance levers and highly coveted platforms for monetization. The same visibility that broke the insider social contract is the visibility that makes the event commercially viable.
This year in particular, the Met Gala was ad space for retail, big tech, and pop culture’s most polarizing couple: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.
First, the unspoken reality: Fashion has always had billionaires in its orbit. As noted above, the early days of the Met Gala included high-society figures solely because they would donate to the newly formed Costume Institute. Fundamentally, this is what a gala is all about. Likewise, magazines have always had advertisers; this is the model through which Vogue operates.
What was different this year, however, was the visibility of the arrangement. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s reported $10M sponsorship made headline news. They were named ‘honorary co-chairs’ and were undeniably present, despite Bezos ultimately avoiding the red carpet due to intense protests.
Instead, the general public saw footage of Meta’s 10,000-square-foot penthouse, where influencers were brought in to enjoy a Met Gala watch party. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was joined on the red carpet by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, and Charles Porch, OpenAI’s new head of partnerships. And four of the most influential players in eCommerce—Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Snap—all purchased tables for $350,000.
The demographic shift was so seismic that the media started calling it ‘The Tech Gala.’ The hidden truth of big tech’s cultural and financial influence has come to the forefront, and the audience has reacted accordingly. It’s a sadly poetic, considering our continued descent into algorithmic sameness. The algorithm shapes what we wear as much as any editor does. Even one deemed as ‘influential’ as Anna Wintour.
Another major cultural pivot for the Met Gala was mainstream fashion’s growing presence, with Gap and eBay both returning to the red carpet, and even fast-fashion darling Zara dressing several guests.
Zac Posen brought Gap into the exclusive fashion event in 2024. Newly named the retailer's creative director at the time, Posen made it a strategic move that let a heritage brand tap into an established designer's cultural clout and industry position. It completely reframed Gap’s perception within fashion’s inner circle and, frankly, whether it was “invited to the party” in the future. This year, Posen and Gap made headlines for dressing Kendall Jenner, arguably one of the more creatively compelling looks of the night.
Ebay has also used the Met Gala as a major marketing platform to reposition itself as a destination for vintage, luxury, and high-fashion items. SZA name-dropped eBay several times because she sourced her look entirely from the platform.
But it was the mention of Zara that turned the most heads. Inditex’s star brand dressed company non-executive chair Marta Ortega, Bad Bunny, and Stevie Nicks, who sported John Galliano’s first design during her gala debut.
Historically, the Met Gala has been the premier canvas for couturiers and design houses to reveal custom designs and sharpen their creative toolset. However, the newer entrants illustrate just how commercialized and mainstream the gala has become, and how the sponsorship net has broadened in order to optimize ‘the business of fashion.’
The Cultural Contradiction
The general public understands the rules of operation, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it or support it. That is where critique comes in.
Minkow calls out the cultural conflict directly and argues that if anyone follows the money long enough, they may not like what they find at the end of the journey.
"In order for art to survive, money has to be funneled into it,” she said. “Where that money comes from can be challenging. People just have to pick their battles, but when they do pick their battles, they get in trouble when their battles aren't consistently aligned."
It all connects to the informed-consumer paradox.
"Ignorance is bliss, but no one's afforded bliss anymore in this world of information,” Minkow said. “You can’t be blissfully unaware."
That’s why some people protest. Some celebrities boycott galas. Some people coordinate a competing ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ to spotlight the social issues that are driving the general public’s indignation tied to Bezos’s involvement: voting rights, ICE surveillance, and the AI takeover.
"There's a class war happening inside of art, and the lines between business, the arts, and fashion are getting more and more blurry,” Minkow said. We may be more knowledgeable of nuance and complexity, but “we can’t do anything about it…It's getting harder and harder to make a consistent, coherent statement."
A consumer may refuse to watch Met Gala footage, but regularly shop on Amazon. A creator may refuse to cover the event as a protest against big tech, but uses Instagram daily. As humans, we’re all innately complex. We also tend to live in the murky middle between our pure intentions and our imperfect actions. In the age of social media and the democratization of critique, those imperfections are amplified without our autonomy, creating an endless cycle powered by commercialization.
The event has been monetized and scaled to service commercial viability. What's left is the Met Gala in name only. It has trappings and spectacle, but sans the actual social value that made it matter to the fashion industry in the first place. The commercialization succeeds precisely because it has destroyed the exclusivity that gave the event its cultural weight to begin with. Its revenue source is now entrenched in everything the creative arts stand to fight against. Therein lies the conflict and contradiction.
A New Cultural Tapestry
The Met Gala will happen next year. The brands will still be there and, like it or not, big tech will likely be there too. The discourse will fracture across a hundred different algorithmic feeds, amplifying and ‘yapping’ about all associated campaigns, protests, and hot takes.
The stylists, editors, and tastemakers who have woven the Met Gala’s narrative will continue to do so. This is not due to surrender or even complacency; it’s because the alternative is disappearing from the picture entirely.
"You still have to be present at a table that maybe you don't want to be invited to, because your taste will become excluded from the scene and from the algorithm,” Minkow said. “Sometimes boycotting does the opposite of what it wants to do. It takes you out of conversations that you still want your views to be inserted into."
Minkow used stylists as an example. They use events such as award shows and galas to influence trend formation. They use influencers and celebrities to insert their creative point of view into the cultural discourse in order to shape the market.
“If every stylist bowed out of the Met Gala, we wouldn't get their perspective."
- Melissa Minkow, CI&T
The Met Gala has become a commercial spectacle with big tech footing the bill. But the stylists, designers, and tastemakers still need to show up. Because absence on the red carpet means an absence from the algorithm, for better or worse. The visual record doesn’t exist, and their creative imprint is lost from the archive. Their creative thread is removed from the embroidery.
Whether we like it or not, the people in charge of the loom are no longer the ones who know how to sew. As Minkow put it: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate different threads. It’s all kind of tied together, and we’re not looking at the same embroidery.”
If commerce is culture, then every cultural form is self-liquidating. The moment it scales and gets monetized, it loses the authenticity that made it matter.
“Your Met Gala was very different than my Met Gala this year.” That's how Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights for CI&T, described the days leading up to fashion's biggest night. She wasn't being metaphorical.
One feed, based in suburban New Jersey, scrolled through guerrilla protest stunts: spoof commemorative merch planted in the Met store, hundreds of bottles of “urine” hidden throughout the museum, billboard takeovers shaming Jeff Bezos for enmeshing himself in fashion's most exclusive night.
Another feed, based in central London, surfaced get-ready content, red-carpet interviews, and craft-forward snaps from celebrity stylists.
This is what Minkow saw, and not much else. “I was looking at the fashion and getting the quick sound bites," she said. "We're all being fed different perspectives and different lenses.”
A single cultural event has fractured into a thousand parallel ones. Economic disparity, tech's quiet annexation of creative fields, the collapsing wall between art and commerce; it’s not unlike Richard Hamilton’s Palindrome, a lenticular painting in the collection of The Met. The image that you see depends on your unique point of view.
This scenario reflects the reality of how we collectively (and individually) consume content and participate in culture. It also illustrates how, despite there being an objective chain of events, our opinions of major news and cultural moments are being swayed by what our algorithms want us to see. And after we consume, comment, remix, and amplify, the plot mutates until it’s indistinguishable.
Different feeds become different threads that shape what we see. Minkow describes it as two distinct embroideries conjoined by the same threads.
This is the essence of the Met Gala’s (and any other over-commercialized event’s) cultural decline: when everyone is a critic, the event is not just secondary to the commentary around the event—it’s tertiary to the meta-commentary and the art produced in protest to the event.
While we can confidently say there was always drama involved in the Met Gala (what major A-list event doesn’t have it?), it was confined to closed rooms and a limited cast of characters, usually on a red carpet or in a glossy magazine. The only moments documented were a few unposed shots and whispers of post-event gossip. Today, the drama is louder, the voices are louder, and the ripple effects are longer.
Collectively, these realities have unraveled the cultural cachet of the Met Gala itself and the general public's belief in its right to exist. It has been undone by visibility and by commerce.
From Peacocking to Pandering
First hosted by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, the Gala was (and remains) an exclusive event to fundraise for the Costume Institute. The Met Gala was never for the public. It was a space for insiders, with mostly fashion insiders and New York high society on the invite list.
Peacocking, in its purest form, is a niche craft executed by specialists for specialists.
We see this in other realms, with the highest forms of craft often becoming unpalatable to the general public. In fact, the chief criticism of modern artists like Jacob Collier, Polyphia, Snarky Puppy, and Vulfpeck is that they are musicians who play chiefly to peacock for other musicians.
The Gala has always been fashion executing fashion for fashion. The fundraising piece was the official philanthropic mission, but the peacocking was the whole point.
The benefit evolved into a high-stakes industry performance where designers, editors, and stylists played to the only room equipped to judge them. By the 1970s, the circle grew to include pop culture figures and movie stars. The spectacle swelled, with media build-up and paparazzi becoming the norm, but the secrecy, overall, remained intact.
The public could watch through a keyhole, yet the semi-privacy made genuine risk-taking possible. When the only critics are peers, you can go further. You can be weirder. You can fail in front of people who praise it as part of the creative process.
While there have been small glimmers of that risk-taking, themes of the past five years have felt underserved and creatively underwhelming. A possible tipping point? When social media influencers were brought into the fray, the once very strict “no pictures” policy became a mere suggestion. On-site documentation in the form of selfies has become the standard. The air of exclusivity has shattered. And evidence of the night is on display for all to pick apart and analyze days, even weeks, later.
This makes being weird scarier. It makes “committing to the bit” feel impossible. And when the theme itself is “fashion is art,” what’s the point in going if you can’t go all in?
"I didn't think anyone did a risky job with it,” Minkow said. “There were a lot of beautiful gowns, but no one was wacky. No one was really doing anything eye-catching and groundbreaking."
For Minkow, that “muted expression” tells a much bigger story about where we are as a society.
“I don't know if it's because people are afraid, or because they don't trust their sources since we're all being fed different viewpoints, or if people are just exhausted and wanted a night of fun. But it was definitely quiet in terms of expression."
Everyone can post, clip, and score looks as attendees venture down the red carpet. Everyone is a commentator, even without the expertise. The peacocking is judged by people who don't speak the language, which completely alters the social contract originally set.
When Monetization Mutes the Mission
Once private communities become public spectacle, they become performance levers and highly coveted platforms for monetization. The same visibility that broke the insider social contract is the visibility that makes the event commercially viable.
This year in particular, the Met Gala was ad space for retail, big tech, and pop culture’s most polarizing couple: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.
First, the unspoken reality: Fashion has always had billionaires in its orbit. As noted above, the early days of the Met Gala included high-society figures solely because they would donate to the newly formed Costume Institute. Fundamentally, this is what a gala is all about. Likewise, magazines have always had advertisers; this is the model through which Vogue operates.
What was different this year, however, was the visibility of the arrangement. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s reported $10M sponsorship made headline news. They were named ‘honorary co-chairs’ and were undeniably present, despite Bezos ultimately avoiding the red carpet due to intense protests.
Instead, the general public saw footage of Meta’s 10,000-square-foot penthouse, where influencers were brought in to enjoy a Met Gala watch party. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was joined on the red carpet by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, and Charles Porch, OpenAI’s new head of partnerships. And four of the most influential players in eCommerce—Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Snap—all purchased tables for $350,000.
The demographic shift was so seismic that the media started calling it ‘The Tech Gala.’ The hidden truth of big tech’s cultural and financial influence has come to the forefront, and the audience has reacted accordingly. It’s a sadly poetic, considering our continued descent into algorithmic sameness. The algorithm shapes what we wear as much as any editor does. Even one deemed as ‘influential’ as Anna Wintour.
Another major cultural pivot for the Met Gala was mainstream fashion’s growing presence, with Gap and eBay both returning to the red carpet, and even fast-fashion darling Zara dressing several guests.
Zac Posen brought Gap into the exclusive fashion event in 2024. Newly named the retailer's creative director at the time, Posen made it a strategic move that let a heritage brand tap into an established designer's cultural clout and industry position. It completely reframed Gap’s perception within fashion’s inner circle and, frankly, whether it was “invited to the party” in the future. This year, Posen and Gap made headlines for dressing Kendall Jenner, arguably one of the more creatively compelling looks of the night.
Ebay has also used the Met Gala as a major marketing platform to reposition itself as a destination for vintage, luxury, and high-fashion items. SZA name-dropped eBay several times because she sourced her look entirely from the platform.
But it was the mention of Zara that turned the most heads. Inditex’s star brand dressed company non-executive chair Marta Ortega, Bad Bunny, and Stevie Nicks, who sported John Galliano’s first design during her gala debut.
Historically, the Met Gala has been the premier canvas for couturiers and design houses to reveal custom designs and sharpen their creative toolset. However, the newer entrants illustrate just how commercialized and mainstream the gala has become, and how the sponsorship net has broadened in order to optimize ‘the business of fashion.’
The Cultural Contradiction
The general public understands the rules of operation, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it or support it. That is where critique comes in.
Minkow calls out the cultural conflict directly and argues that if anyone follows the money long enough, they may not like what they find at the end of the journey.
"In order for art to survive, money has to be funneled into it,” she said. “Where that money comes from can be challenging. People just have to pick their battles, but when they do pick their battles, they get in trouble when their battles aren't consistently aligned."
It all connects to the informed-consumer paradox.
"Ignorance is bliss, but no one's afforded bliss anymore in this world of information,” Minkow said. “You can’t be blissfully unaware."
That’s why some people protest. Some celebrities boycott galas. Some people coordinate a competing ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ to spotlight the social issues that are driving the general public’s indignation tied to Bezos’s involvement: voting rights, ICE surveillance, and the AI takeover.
"There's a class war happening inside of art, and the lines between business, the arts, and fashion are getting more and more blurry,” Minkow said. We may be more knowledgeable of nuance and complexity, but “we can’t do anything about it…It's getting harder and harder to make a consistent, coherent statement."
A consumer may refuse to watch Met Gala footage, but regularly shop on Amazon. A creator may refuse to cover the event as a protest against big tech, but uses Instagram daily. As humans, we’re all innately complex. We also tend to live in the murky middle between our pure intentions and our imperfect actions. In the age of social media and the democratization of critique, those imperfections are amplified without our autonomy, creating an endless cycle powered by commercialization.
The event has been monetized and scaled to service commercial viability. What's left is the Met Gala in name only. It has trappings and spectacle, but sans the actual social value that made it matter to the fashion industry in the first place. The commercialization succeeds precisely because it has destroyed the exclusivity that gave the event its cultural weight to begin with. Its revenue source is now entrenched in everything the creative arts stand to fight against. Therein lies the conflict and contradiction.
A New Cultural Tapestry
The Met Gala will happen next year. The brands will still be there and, like it or not, big tech will likely be there too. The discourse will fracture across a hundred different algorithmic feeds, amplifying and ‘yapping’ about all associated campaigns, protests, and hot takes.
The stylists, editors, and tastemakers who have woven the Met Gala’s narrative will continue to do so. This is not due to surrender or even complacency; it’s because the alternative is disappearing from the picture entirely.
"You still have to be present at a table that maybe you don't want to be invited to, because your taste will become excluded from the scene and from the algorithm,” Minkow said. “Sometimes boycotting does the opposite of what it wants to do. It takes you out of conversations that you still want your views to be inserted into."
Minkow used stylists as an example. They use events such as award shows and galas to influence trend formation. They use influencers and celebrities to insert their creative point of view into the cultural discourse in order to shape the market.
“If every stylist bowed out of the Met Gala, we wouldn't get their perspective."
- Melissa Minkow, CI&T
The Met Gala has become a commercial spectacle with big tech footing the bill. But the stylists, designers, and tastemakers still need to show up. Because absence on the red carpet means an absence from the algorithm, for better or worse. The visual record doesn’t exist, and their creative imprint is lost from the archive. Their creative thread is removed from the embroidery.
Whether we like it or not, the people in charge of the loom are no longer the ones who know how to sew. As Minkow put it: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate different threads. It’s all kind of tied together, and we’re not looking at the same embroidery.”
If commerce is culture, then every cultural form is self-liquidating. The moment it scales and gets monetized, it loses the authenticity that made it matter.
“Your Met Gala was very different than my Met Gala this year.” That's how Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights for CI&T, described the days leading up to fashion's biggest night. She wasn't being metaphorical.
One feed, based in suburban New Jersey, scrolled through guerrilla protest stunts: spoof commemorative merch planted in the Met store, hundreds of bottles of “urine” hidden throughout the museum, billboard takeovers shaming Jeff Bezos for enmeshing himself in fashion's most exclusive night.
Another feed, based in central London, surfaced get-ready content, red-carpet interviews, and craft-forward snaps from celebrity stylists.
This is what Minkow saw, and not much else. “I was looking at the fashion and getting the quick sound bites," she said. "We're all being fed different perspectives and different lenses.”
A single cultural event has fractured into a thousand parallel ones. Economic disparity, tech's quiet annexation of creative fields, the collapsing wall between art and commerce; it’s not unlike Richard Hamilton’s Palindrome, a lenticular painting in the collection of The Met. The image that you see depends on your unique point of view.
This scenario reflects the reality of how we collectively (and individually) consume content and participate in culture. It also illustrates how, despite there being an objective chain of events, our opinions of major news and cultural moments are being swayed by what our algorithms want us to see. And after we consume, comment, remix, and amplify, the plot mutates until it’s indistinguishable.
Different feeds become different threads that shape what we see. Minkow describes it as two distinct embroideries conjoined by the same threads.
This is the essence of the Met Gala’s (and any other over-commercialized event’s) cultural decline: when everyone is a critic, the event is not just secondary to the commentary around the event—it’s tertiary to the meta-commentary and the art produced in protest to the event.
While we can confidently say there was always drama involved in the Met Gala (what major A-list event doesn’t have it?), it was confined to closed rooms and a limited cast of characters, usually on a red carpet or in a glossy magazine. The only moments documented were a few unposed shots and whispers of post-event gossip. Today, the drama is louder, the voices are louder, and the ripple effects are longer.
Collectively, these realities have unraveled the cultural cachet of the Met Gala itself and the general public's belief in its right to exist. It has been undone by visibility and by commerce.
From Peacocking to Pandering
First hosted by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, the Gala was (and remains) an exclusive event to fundraise for the Costume Institute. The Met Gala was never for the public. It was a space for insiders, with mostly fashion insiders and New York high society on the invite list.
Peacocking, in its purest form, is a niche craft executed by specialists for specialists.
We see this in other realms, with the highest forms of craft often becoming unpalatable to the general public. In fact, the chief criticism of modern artists like Jacob Collier, Polyphia, Snarky Puppy, and Vulfpeck is that they are musicians who play chiefly to peacock for other musicians.
The Gala has always been fashion executing fashion for fashion. The fundraising piece was the official philanthropic mission, but the peacocking was the whole point.
The benefit evolved into a high-stakes industry performance where designers, editors, and stylists played to the only room equipped to judge them. By the 1970s, the circle grew to include pop culture figures and movie stars. The spectacle swelled, with media build-up and paparazzi becoming the norm, but the secrecy, overall, remained intact.
The public could watch through a keyhole, yet the semi-privacy made genuine risk-taking possible. When the only critics are peers, you can go further. You can be weirder. You can fail in front of people who praise it as part of the creative process.
While there have been small glimmers of that risk-taking, themes of the past five years have felt underserved and creatively underwhelming. A possible tipping point? When social media influencers were brought into the fray, the once very strict “no pictures” policy became a mere suggestion. On-site documentation in the form of selfies has become the standard. The air of exclusivity has shattered. And evidence of the night is on display for all to pick apart and analyze days, even weeks, later.
This makes being weird scarier. It makes “committing to the bit” feel impossible. And when the theme itself is “fashion is art,” what’s the point in going if you can’t go all in?
"I didn't think anyone did a risky job with it,” Minkow said. “There were a lot of beautiful gowns, but no one was wacky. No one was really doing anything eye-catching and groundbreaking."
For Minkow, that “muted expression” tells a much bigger story about where we are as a society.
“I don't know if it's because people are afraid, or because they don't trust their sources since we're all being fed different viewpoints, or if people are just exhausted and wanted a night of fun. But it was definitely quiet in terms of expression."
Everyone can post, clip, and score looks as attendees venture down the red carpet. Everyone is a commentator, even without the expertise. The peacocking is judged by people who don't speak the language, which completely alters the social contract originally set.
When Monetization Mutes the Mission
Once private communities become public spectacle, they become performance levers and highly coveted platforms for monetization. The same visibility that broke the insider social contract is the visibility that makes the event commercially viable.
This year in particular, the Met Gala was ad space for retail, big tech, and pop culture’s most polarizing couple: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.
First, the unspoken reality: Fashion has always had billionaires in its orbit. As noted above, the early days of the Met Gala included high-society figures solely because they would donate to the newly formed Costume Institute. Fundamentally, this is what a gala is all about. Likewise, magazines have always had advertisers; this is the model through which Vogue operates.
What was different this year, however, was the visibility of the arrangement. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s reported $10M sponsorship made headline news. They were named ‘honorary co-chairs’ and were undeniably present, despite Bezos ultimately avoiding the red carpet due to intense protests.
Instead, the general public saw footage of Meta’s 10,000-square-foot penthouse, where influencers were brought in to enjoy a Met Gala watch party. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was joined on the red carpet by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, and Charles Porch, OpenAI’s new head of partnerships. And four of the most influential players in eCommerce—Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Snap—all purchased tables for $350,000.
The demographic shift was so seismic that the media started calling it ‘The Tech Gala.’ The hidden truth of big tech’s cultural and financial influence has come to the forefront, and the audience has reacted accordingly. It’s a sadly poetic, considering our continued descent into algorithmic sameness. The algorithm shapes what we wear as much as any editor does. Even one deemed as ‘influential’ as Anna Wintour.
Another major cultural pivot for the Met Gala was mainstream fashion’s growing presence, with Gap and eBay both returning to the red carpet, and even fast-fashion darling Zara dressing several guests.
Zac Posen brought Gap into the exclusive fashion event in 2024. Newly named the retailer's creative director at the time, Posen made it a strategic move that let a heritage brand tap into an established designer's cultural clout and industry position. It completely reframed Gap’s perception within fashion’s inner circle and, frankly, whether it was “invited to the party” in the future. This year, Posen and Gap made headlines for dressing Kendall Jenner, arguably one of the more creatively compelling looks of the night.
Ebay has also used the Met Gala as a major marketing platform to reposition itself as a destination for vintage, luxury, and high-fashion items. SZA name-dropped eBay several times because she sourced her look entirely from the platform.
But it was the mention of Zara that turned the most heads. Inditex’s star brand dressed company non-executive chair Marta Ortega, Bad Bunny, and Stevie Nicks, who sported John Galliano’s first design during her gala debut.
Historically, the Met Gala has been the premier canvas for couturiers and design houses to reveal custom designs and sharpen their creative toolset. However, the newer entrants illustrate just how commercialized and mainstream the gala has become, and how the sponsorship net has broadened in order to optimize ‘the business of fashion.’
The Cultural Contradiction
The general public understands the rules of operation, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it or support it. That is where critique comes in.
Minkow calls out the cultural conflict directly and argues that if anyone follows the money long enough, they may not like what they find at the end of the journey.
"In order for art to survive, money has to be funneled into it,” she said. “Where that money comes from can be challenging. People just have to pick their battles, but when they do pick their battles, they get in trouble when their battles aren't consistently aligned."
It all connects to the informed-consumer paradox.
"Ignorance is bliss, but no one's afforded bliss anymore in this world of information,” Minkow said. “You can’t be blissfully unaware."
That’s why some people protest. Some celebrities boycott galas. Some people coordinate a competing ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ to spotlight the social issues that are driving the general public’s indignation tied to Bezos’s involvement: voting rights, ICE surveillance, and the AI takeover.
"There's a class war happening inside of art, and the lines between business, the arts, and fashion are getting more and more blurry,” Minkow said. We may be more knowledgeable of nuance and complexity, but “we can’t do anything about it…It's getting harder and harder to make a consistent, coherent statement."
A consumer may refuse to watch Met Gala footage, but regularly shop on Amazon. A creator may refuse to cover the event as a protest against big tech, but uses Instagram daily. As humans, we’re all innately complex. We also tend to live in the murky middle between our pure intentions and our imperfect actions. In the age of social media and the democratization of critique, those imperfections are amplified without our autonomy, creating an endless cycle powered by commercialization.
The event has been monetized and scaled to service commercial viability. What's left is the Met Gala in name only. It has trappings and spectacle, but sans the actual social value that made it matter to the fashion industry in the first place. The commercialization succeeds precisely because it has destroyed the exclusivity that gave the event its cultural weight to begin with. Its revenue source is now entrenched in everything the creative arts stand to fight against. Therein lies the conflict and contradiction.
A New Cultural Tapestry
The Met Gala will happen next year. The brands will still be there and, like it or not, big tech will likely be there too. The discourse will fracture across a hundred different algorithmic feeds, amplifying and ‘yapping’ about all associated campaigns, protests, and hot takes.
The stylists, editors, and tastemakers who have woven the Met Gala’s narrative will continue to do so. This is not due to surrender or even complacency; it’s because the alternative is disappearing from the picture entirely.
"You still have to be present at a table that maybe you don't want to be invited to, because your taste will become excluded from the scene and from the algorithm,” Minkow said. “Sometimes boycotting does the opposite of what it wants to do. It takes you out of conversations that you still want your views to be inserted into."
Minkow used stylists as an example. They use events such as award shows and galas to influence trend formation. They use influencers and celebrities to insert their creative point of view into the cultural discourse in order to shape the market.
“If every stylist bowed out of the Met Gala, we wouldn't get their perspective."
- Melissa Minkow, CI&T
The Met Gala has become a commercial spectacle with big tech footing the bill. But the stylists, designers, and tastemakers still need to show up. Because absence on the red carpet means an absence from the algorithm, for better or worse. The visual record doesn’t exist, and their creative imprint is lost from the archive. Their creative thread is removed from the embroidery.
Whether we like it or not, the people in charge of the loom are no longer the ones who know how to sew. As Minkow put it: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate different threads. It’s all kind of tied together, and we’re not looking at the same embroidery.”
If commerce is culture, then every cultural form is self-liquidating. The moment it scales and gets monetized, it loses the authenticity that made it matter.
“Your Met Gala was very different than my Met Gala this year.” That's how Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights for CI&T, described the days leading up to fashion's biggest night. She wasn't being metaphorical.
One feed, based in suburban New Jersey, scrolled through guerrilla protest stunts: spoof commemorative merch planted in the Met store, hundreds of bottles of “urine” hidden throughout the museum, billboard takeovers shaming Jeff Bezos for enmeshing himself in fashion's most exclusive night.
Another feed, based in central London, surfaced get-ready content, red-carpet interviews, and craft-forward snaps from celebrity stylists.
This is what Minkow saw, and not much else. “I was looking at the fashion and getting the quick sound bites," she said. "We're all being fed different perspectives and different lenses.”
A single cultural event has fractured into a thousand parallel ones. Economic disparity, tech's quiet annexation of creative fields, the collapsing wall between art and commerce; it’s not unlike Richard Hamilton’s Palindrome, a lenticular painting in the collection of The Met. The image that you see depends on your unique point of view.
This scenario reflects the reality of how we collectively (and individually) consume content and participate in culture. It also illustrates how, despite there being an objective chain of events, our opinions of major news and cultural moments are being swayed by what our algorithms want us to see. And after we consume, comment, remix, and amplify, the plot mutates until it’s indistinguishable.
Different feeds become different threads that shape what we see. Minkow describes it as two distinct embroideries conjoined by the same threads.
This is the essence of the Met Gala’s (and any other over-commercialized event’s) cultural decline: when everyone is a critic, the event is not just secondary to the commentary around the event—it’s tertiary to the meta-commentary and the art produced in protest to the event.
While we can confidently say there was always drama involved in the Met Gala (what major A-list event doesn’t have it?), it was confined to closed rooms and a limited cast of characters, usually on a red carpet or in a glossy magazine. The only moments documented were a few unposed shots and whispers of post-event gossip. Today, the drama is louder, the voices are louder, and the ripple effects are longer.
Collectively, these realities have unraveled the cultural cachet of the Met Gala itself and the general public's belief in its right to exist. It has been undone by visibility and by commerce.
From Peacocking to Pandering
First hosted by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, the Gala was (and remains) an exclusive event to fundraise for the Costume Institute. The Met Gala was never for the public. It was a space for insiders, with mostly fashion insiders and New York high society on the invite list.
Peacocking, in its purest form, is a niche craft executed by specialists for specialists.
We see this in other realms, with the highest forms of craft often becoming unpalatable to the general public. In fact, the chief criticism of modern artists like Jacob Collier, Polyphia, Snarky Puppy, and Vulfpeck is that they are musicians who play chiefly to peacock for other musicians.
The Gala has always been fashion executing fashion for fashion. The fundraising piece was the official philanthropic mission, but the peacocking was the whole point.
The benefit evolved into a high-stakes industry performance where designers, editors, and stylists played to the only room equipped to judge them. By the 1970s, the circle grew to include pop culture figures and movie stars. The spectacle swelled, with media build-up and paparazzi becoming the norm, but the secrecy, overall, remained intact.
The public could watch through a keyhole, yet the semi-privacy made genuine risk-taking possible. When the only critics are peers, you can go further. You can be weirder. You can fail in front of people who praise it as part of the creative process.
While there have been small glimmers of that risk-taking, themes of the past five years have felt underserved and creatively underwhelming. A possible tipping point? When social media influencers were brought into the fray, the once very strict “no pictures” policy became a mere suggestion. On-site documentation in the form of selfies has become the standard. The air of exclusivity has shattered. And evidence of the night is on display for all to pick apart and analyze days, even weeks, later.
This makes being weird scarier. It makes “committing to the bit” feel impossible. And when the theme itself is “fashion is art,” what’s the point in going if you can’t go all in?
"I didn't think anyone did a risky job with it,” Minkow said. “There were a lot of beautiful gowns, but no one was wacky. No one was really doing anything eye-catching and groundbreaking."
For Minkow, that “muted expression” tells a much bigger story about where we are as a society.
“I don't know if it's because people are afraid, or because they don't trust their sources since we're all being fed different viewpoints, or if people are just exhausted and wanted a night of fun. But it was definitely quiet in terms of expression."
Everyone can post, clip, and score looks as attendees venture down the red carpet. Everyone is a commentator, even without the expertise. The peacocking is judged by people who don't speak the language, which completely alters the social contract originally set.
When Monetization Mutes the Mission
Once private communities become public spectacle, they become performance levers and highly coveted platforms for monetization. The same visibility that broke the insider social contract is the visibility that makes the event commercially viable.
This year in particular, the Met Gala was ad space for retail, big tech, and pop culture’s most polarizing couple: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.
First, the unspoken reality: Fashion has always had billionaires in its orbit. As noted above, the early days of the Met Gala included high-society figures solely because they would donate to the newly formed Costume Institute. Fundamentally, this is what a gala is all about. Likewise, magazines have always had advertisers; this is the model through which Vogue operates.
What was different this year, however, was the visibility of the arrangement. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s reported $10M sponsorship made headline news. They were named ‘honorary co-chairs’ and were undeniably present, despite Bezos ultimately avoiding the red carpet due to intense protests.
Instead, the general public saw footage of Meta’s 10,000-square-foot penthouse, where influencers were brought in to enjoy a Met Gala watch party. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was joined on the red carpet by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, and Charles Porch, OpenAI’s new head of partnerships. And four of the most influential players in eCommerce—Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Snap—all purchased tables for $350,000.
The demographic shift was so seismic that the media started calling it ‘The Tech Gala.’ The hidden truth of big tech’s cultural and financial influence has come to the forefront, and the audience has reacted accordingly. It’s a sadly poetic, considering our continued descent into algorithmic sameness. The algorithm shapes what we wear as much as any editor does. Even one deemed as ‘influential’ as Anna Wintour.
Another major cultural pivot for the Met Gala was mainstream fashion’s growing presence, with Gap and eBay both returning to the red carpet, and even fast-fashion darling Zara dressing several guests.
Zac Posen brought Gap into the exclusive fashion event in 2024. Newly named the retailer's creative director at the time, Posen made it a strategic move that let a heritage brand tap into an established designer's cultural clout and industry position. It completely reframed Gap’s perception within fashion’s inner circle and, frankly, whether it was “invited to the party” in the future. This year, Posen and Gap made headlines for dressing Kendall Jenner, arguably one of the more creatively compelling looks of the night.
Ebay has also used the Met Gala as a major marketing platform to reposition itself as a destination for vintage, luxury, and high-fashion items. SZA name-dropped eBay several times because she sourced her look entirely from the platform.
But it was the mention of Zara that turned the most heads. Inditex’s star brand dressed company non-executive chair Marta Ortega, Bad Bunny, and Stevie Nicks, who sported John Galliano’s first design during her gala debut.
Historically, the Met Gala has been the premier canvas for couturiers and design houses to reveal custom designs and sharpen their creative toolset. However, the newer entrants illustrate just how commercialized and mainstream the gala has become, and how the sponsorship net has broadened in order to optimize ‘the business of fashion.’
The Cultural Contradiction
The general public understands the rules of operation, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it or support it. That is where critique comes in.
Minkow calls out the cultural conflict directly and argues that if anyone follows the money long enough, they may not like what they find at the end of the journey.
"In order for art to survive, money has to be funneled into it,” she said. “Where that money comes from can be challenging. People just have to pick their battles, but when they do pick their battles, they get in trouble when their battles aren't consistently aligned."
It all connects to the informed-consumer paradox.
"Ignorance is bliss, but no one's afforded bliss anymore in this world of information,” Minkow said. “You can’t be blissfully unaware."
That’s why some people protest. Some celebrities boycott galas. Some people coordinate a competing ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ to spotlight the social issues that are driving the general public’s indignation tied to Bezos’s involvement: voting rights, ICE surveillance, and the AI takeover.
"There's a class war happening inside of art, and the lines between business, the arts, and fashion are getting more and more blurry,” Minkow said. We may be more knowledgeable of nuance and complexity, but “we can’t do anything about it…It's getting harder and harder to make a consistent, coherent statement."
A consumer may refuse to watch Met Gala footage, but regularly shop on Amazon. A creator may refuse to cover the event as a protest against big tech, but uses Instagram daily. As humans, we’re all innately complex. We also tend to live in the murky middle between our pure intentions and our imperfect actions. In the age of social media and the democratization of critique, those imperfections are amplified without our autonomy, creating an endless cycle powered by commercialization.
The event has been monetized and scaled to service commercial viability. What's left is the Met Gala in name only. It has trappings and spectacle, but sans the actual social value that made it matter to the fashion industry in the first place. The commercialization succeeds precisely because it has destroyed the exclusivity that gave the event its cultural weight to begin with. Its revenue source is now entrenched in everything the creative arts stand to fight against. Therein lies the conflict and contradiction.
A New Cultural Tapestry
The Met Gala will happen next year. The brands will still be there and, like it or not, big tech will likely be there too. The discourse will fracture across a hundred different algorithmic feeds, amplifying and ‘yapping’ about all associated campaigns, protests, and hot takes.
The stylists, editors, and tastemakers who have woven the Met Gala’s narrative will continue to do so. This is not due to surrender or even complacency; it’s because the alternative is disappearing from the picture entirely.
"You still have to be present at a table that maybe you don't want to be invited to, because your taste will become excluded from the scene and from the algorithm,” Minkow said. “Sometimes boycotting does the opposite of what it wants to do. It takes you out of conversations that you still want your views to be inserted into."
Minkow used stylists as an example. They use events such as award shows and galas to influence trend formation. They use influencers and celebrities to insert their creative point of view into the cultural discourse in order to shape the market.
“If every stylist bowed out of the Met Gala, we wouldn't get their perspective."
- Melissa Minkow, CI&T
The Met Gala has become a commercial spectacle with big tech footing the bill. But the stylists, designers, and tastemakers still need to show up. Because absence on the red carpet means an absence from the algorithm, for better or worse. The visual record doesn’t exist, and their creative imprint is lost from the archive. Their creative thread is removed from the embroidery.
Whether we like it or not, the people in charge of the loom are no longer the ones who know how to sew. As Minkow put it: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate different threads. It’s all kind of tied together, and we’re not looking at the same embroidery.”
If commerce is culture, then every cultural form is self-liquidating. The moment it scales and gets monetized, it loses the authenticity that made it matter.
“Your Met Gala was very different than my Met Gala this year.” That's how Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights for CI&T, described the days leading up to fashion's biggest night. She wasn't being metaphorical.
One feed, based in suburban New Jersey, scrolled through guerrilla protest stunts: spoof commemorative merch planted in the Met store, hundreds of bottles of “urine” hidden throughout the museum, billboard takeovers shaming Jeff Bezos for enmeshing himself in fashion's most exclusive night.
Another feed, based in central London, surfaced get-ready content, red-carpet interviews, and craft-forward snaps from celebrity stylists.
This is what Minkow saw, and not much else. “I was looking at the fashion and getting the quick sound bites," she said. "We're all being fed different perspectives and different lenses.”
A single cultural event has fractured into a thousand parallel ones. Economic disparity, tech's quiet annexation of creative fields, the collapsing wall between art and commerce; it’s not unlike Richard Hamilton’s Palindrome, a lenticular painting in the collection of The Met. The image that you see depends on your unique point of view.
This scenario reflects the reality of how we collectively (and individually) consume content and participate in culture. It also illustrates how, despite there being an objective chain of events, our opinions of major news and cultural moments are being swayed by what our algorithms want us to see. And after we consume, comment, remix, and amplify, the plot mutates until it’s indistinguishable.
Different feeds become different threads that shape what we see. Minkow describes it as two distinct embroideries conjoined by the same threads.
This is the essence of the Met Gala’s (and any other over-commercialized event’s) cultural decline: when everyone is a critic, the event is not just secondary to the commentary around the event—it’s tertiary to the meta-commentary and the art produced in protest to the event.
While we can confidently say there was always drama involved in the Met Gala (what major A-list event doesn’t have it?), it was confined to closed rooms and a limited cast of characters, usually on a red carpet or in a glossy magazine. The only moments documented were a few unposed shots and whispers of post-event gossip. Today, the drama is louder, the voices are louder, and the ripple effects are longer.
Collectively, these realities have unraveled the cultural cachet of the Met Gala itself and the general public's belief in its right to exist. It has been undone by visibility and by commerce.
From Peacocking to Pandering
First hosted by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948, the Gala was (and remains) an exclusive event to fundraise for the Costume Institute. The Met Gala was never for the public. It was a space for insiders, with mostly fashion insiders and New York high society on the invite list.
Peacocking, in its purest form, is a niche craft executed by specialists for specialists.
We see this in other realms, with the highest forms of craft often becoming unpalatable to the general public. In fact, the chief criticism of modern artists like Jacob Collier, Polyphia, Snarky Puppy, and Vulfpeck is that they are musicians who play chiefly to peacock for other musicians.
The Gala has always been fashion executing fashion for fashion. The fundraising piece was the official philanthropic mission, but the peacocking was the whole point.
The benefit evolved into a high-stakes industry performance where designers, editors, and stylists played to the only room equipped to judge them. By the 1970s, the circle grew to include pop culture figures and movie stars. The spectacle swelled, with media build-up and paparazzi becoming the norm, but the secrecy, overall, remained intact.
The public could watch through a keyhole, yet the semi-privacy made genuine risk-taking possible. When the only critics are peers, you can go further. You can be weirder. You can fail in front of people who praise it as part of the creative process.
While there have been small glimmers of that risk-taking, themes of the past five years have felt underserved and creatively underwhelming. A possible tipping point? When social media influencers were brought into the fray, the once very strict “no pictures” policy became a mere suggestion. On-site documentation in the form of selfies has become the standard. The air of exclusivity has shattered. And evidence of the night is on display for all to pick apart and analyze days, even weeks, later.
This makes being weird scarier. It makes “committing to the bit” feel impossible. And when the theme itself is “fashion is art,” what’s the point in going if you can’t go all in?
"I didn't think anyone did a risky job with it,” Minkow said. “There were a lot of beautiful gowns, but no one was wacky. No one was really doing anything eye-catching and groundbreaking."
For Minkow, that “muted expression” tells a much bigger story about where we are as a society.
“I don't know if it's because people are afraid, or because they don't trust their sources since we're all being fed different viewpoints, or if people are just exhausted and wanted a night of fun. But it was definitely quiet in terms of expression."
Everyone can post, clip, and score looks as attendees venture down the red carpet. Everyone is a commentator, even without the expertise. The peacocking is judged by people who don't speak the language, which completely alters the social contract originally set.
When Monetization Mutes the Mission
Once private communities become public spectacle, they become performance levers and highly coveted platforms for monetization. The same visibility that broke the insider social contract is the visibility that makes the event commercially viable.
This year in particular, the Met Gala was ad space for retail, big tech, and pop culture’s most polarizing couple: Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.
First, the unspoken reality: Fashion has always had billionaires in its orbit. As noted above, the early days of the Met Gala included high-society figures solely because they would donate to the newly formed Costume Institute. Fundamentally, this is what a gala is all about. Likewise, magazines have always had advertisers; this is the model through which Vogue operates.
What was different this year, however, was the visibility of the arrangement. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s reported $10M sponsorship made headline news. They were named ‘honorary co-chairs’ and were undeniably present, despite Bezos ultimately avoiding the red carpet due to intense protests.
Instead, the general public saw footage of Meta’s 10,000-square-foot penthouse, where influencers were brought in to enjoy a Met Gala watch party. Instagram’s Adam Mosseri was joined on the red carpet by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel, and Charles Porch, OpenAI’s new head of partnerships. And four of the most influential players in eCommerce—Amazon, Meta, Shopify, and Snap—all purchased tables for $350,000.
The demographic shift was so seismic that the media started calling it ‘The Tech Gala.’ The hidden truth of big tech’s cultural and financial influence has come to the forefront, and the audience has reacted accordingly. It’s a sadly poetic, considering our continued descent into algorithmic sameness. The algorithm shapes what we wear as much as any editor does. Even one deemed as ‘influential’ as Anna Wintour.
Another major cultural pivot for the Met Gala was mainstream fashion’s growing presence, with Gap and eBay both returning to the red carpet, and even fast-fashion darling Zara dressing several guests.
Zac Posen brought Gap into the exclusive fashion event in 2024. Newly named the retailer's creative director at the time, Posen made it a strategic move that let a heritage brand tap into an established designer's cultural clout and industry position. It completely reframed Gap’s perception within fashion’s inner circle and, frankly, whether it was “invited to the party” in the future. This year, Posen and Gap made headlines for dressing Kendall Jenner, arguably one of the more creatively compelling looks of the night.
Ebay has also used the Met Gala as a major marketing platform to reposition itself as a destination for vintage, luxury, and high-fashion items. SZA name-dropped eBay several times because she sourced her look entirely from the platform.
But it was the mention of Zara that turned the most heads. Inditex’s star brand dressed company non-executive chair Marta Ortega, Bad Bunny, and Stevie Nicks, who sported John Galliano’s first design during her gala debut.
Historically, the Met Gala has been the premier canvas for couturiers and design houses to reveal custom designs and sharpen their creative toolset. However, the newer entrants illustrate just how commercialized and mainstream the gala has become, and how the sponsorship net has broadened in order to optimize ‘the business of fashion.’
The Cultural Contradiction
The general public understands the rules of operation, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it or support it. That is where critique comes in.
Minkow calls out the cultural conflict directly and argues that if anyone follows the money long enough, they may not like what they find at the end of the journey.
"In order for art to survive, money has to be funneled into it,” she said. “Where that money comes from can be challenging. People just have to pick their battles, but when they do pick their battles, they get in trouble when their battles aren't consistently aligned."
It all connects to the informed-consumer paradox.
"Ignorance is bliss, but no one's afforded bliss anymore in this world of information,” Minkow said. “You can’t be blissfully unaware."
That’s why some people protest. Some celebrities boycott galas. Some people coordinate a competing ‘Ball Without Billionaires’ to spotlight the social issues that are driving the general public’s indignation tied to Bezos’s involvement: voting rights, ICE surveillance, and the AI takeover.
"There's a class war happening inside of art, and the lines between business, the arts, and fashion are getting more and more blurry,” Minkow said. We may be more knowledgeable of nuance and complexity, but “we can’t do anything about it…It's getting harder and harder to make a consistent, coherent statement."
A consumer may refuse to watch Met Gala footage, but regularly shop on Amazon. A creator may refuse to cover the event as a protest against big tech, but uses Instagram daily. As humans, we’re all innately complex. We also tend to live in the murky middle between our pure intentions and our imperfect actions. In the age of social media and the democratization of critique, those imperfections are amplified without our autonomy, creating an endless cycle powered by commercialization.
The event has been monetized and scaled to service commercial viability. What's left is the Met Gala in name only. It has trappings and spectacle, but sans the actual social value that made it matter to the fashion industry in the first place. The commercialization succeeds precisely because it has destroyed the exclusivity that gave the event its cultural weight to begin with. Its revenue source is now entrenched in everything the creative arts stand to fight against. Therein lies the conflict and contradiction.
A New Cultural Tapestry
The Met Gala will happen next year. The brands will still be there and, like it or not, big tech will likely be there too. The discourse will fracture across a hundred different algorithmic feeds, amplifying and ‘yapping’ about all associated campaigns, protests, and hot takes.
The stylists, editors, and tastemakers who have woven the Met Gala’s narrative will continue to do so. This is not due to surrender or even complacency; it’s because the alternative is disappearing from the picture entirely.
"You still have to be present at a table that maybe you don't want to be invited to, because your taste will become excluded from the scene and from the algorithm,” Minkow said. “Sometimes boycotting does the opposite of what it wants to do. It takes you out of conversations that you still want your views to be inserted into."
Minkow used stylists as an example. They use events such as award shows and galas to influence trend formation. They use influencers and celebrities to insert their creative point of view into the cultural discourse in order to shape the market.
“If every stylist bowed out of the Met Gala, we wouldn't get their perspective."
- Melissa Minkow, CI&T
The Met Gala has become a commercial spectacle with big tech footing the bill. But the stylists, designers, and tastemakers still need to show up. Because absence on the red carpet means an absence from the algorithm, for better or worse. The visual record doesn’t exist, and their creative imprint is lost from the archive. Their creative thread is removed from the embroidery.
Whether we like it or not, the people in charge of the loom are no longer the ones who know how to sew. As Minkow put it: “It’s becoming more difficult to separate different threads. It’s all kind of tied together, and we’re not looking at the same embroidery.”
If commerce is culture, then every cultural form is self-liquidating. The moment it scales and gets monetized, it loses the authenticity that made it matter.
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