THE ONE PERCENT

For years, the Met Gala has been the most spectacular spectacle in the fashion world a cross between an opera, a theater of the absurd, and an exclusive banquet for the select few. In 2026, it was supposed to be the culmination of aesthetic decadence and a triumph of imagination. Yet it wasn’t the glitz or the structures teetering on the edge of architecture that captured the most attention, but a single gesture. One dollar. One face. And a very uncomfortable question.

Sarah Paulson, an actress who has spent years navigating between standout and unconventional roles, between the mainstream and something far more sophisticated, appeared on the stairs. The audience remembers her both from the American Horror Story series and from the award-winning The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. She embodies intelligence, irony, and a conscious play with convention. And that is precisely why her selection was no accident.

A gray, almost ethereal dress made of layers of tulle romantic to the point of excess was paired with something that brutally jolted the viewer out of the comfort of aesthetic contemplation: a one dollar bill covering her eyes. Not jewelry, not makeup, but currency as a mask. A simple, almost banal gesture. And yet, a striking one.

Her dollar sign mask functions as a very contemporary symbol: it’s no longer about who has the money; it’s about who’s looking through it. And everyone is looking. The difference is that some have a permanent filter, while others have only an aspirational one.

Is this hypocrisy? A little bit. However, it accurately illustrates what today’s luxury space is a mix of authenticity and performance. Fashion has been playing this game for a long time: it pretends to be rebellious while simultaneously selling it in its most polished form. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s its core feature.

So was Sarah Paulson a hypocrite? Perhaps. Maybe that was the point. Because nothing exposes the system more effectively than participating in it without trying to feign innocence.

For here, at the very heart of an event like the Met Gala a temple of luxury sponsored by names like Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez comes a message aimed squarely at luxury. At the “one percent.” At those sitting at tables that others only get to see on Instagram.

And this is where the real show begins. Because fashion especially high fashion has long flirted with self-criticism. It loves to pretend it’s self-aware and ironic, that it can look in the mirror and say, “Yes, we are the problem.” Yet it rarely does so safely. With detachment. With an aesthetic filter that turns rebellion into a product. Paulson has partially shattered that filter, though not entirely.

Because can you really criticize the system while standing right at its center? Is the dollar bill on her eye an act of defiance, or rather another look that can be sold, commented on, liked, and forgotten? The internet, as usual, had no doubts: hypocrisy. An easy performance. Morality on the red carpet. And yet, such an interpretation is too convenient.

The real problem isn’t that the wealthy criticize wealth. The problem is that only they have a microphone loud enough for that criticism to be heard globally. And that is precisely what makes this gesture so disturbing, because it reveals a paradox that cannot be resolved through mere stylization.

The Met Gala has never been a celebration of the people. It is not a democratic celebration of creativity. It is a carefully staged ritual in which money and prestige are not merely present they are the foundation of the entire narrative. Every gown, every diamond, every step on the stairs is an investment in visibility.

In this context, the dollar bill on one’s face isn’t just a symbol of “the one percent.” It’s also a reminder that we’re all looking through the same lens only some have it closer to their faces.

Or perhaps the most radical gesture wouldn’t be a dollar bill on the forehead, but rather an absence from those stairs? Because the truth is this: The Met Gala isn’t a celebration of people. It isn’t even a celebration of fashion. It’s a celebration of visibility fueled by money. Every look is a message, every message is currency, and every currency is reach.

Photos: Michael Buckner/Penske Media via Getty Images, Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

 

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THE MOMENT WHEN FASHION BECAME ETERNITY

On the red carpet of the 2026 MET Gala, where fashion has long ceased to be merely clothing and has become a language of art, Heidi Klum appeared not so much as a guest but as a statement. She did not walk in; she was unveiled. Like a sculpture. Like an idea.

In the world of red carpets, we’ve seen it all: architectural gowns, conceptual silhouettes, fashion that flirts with technology. And yet Klum did something that seemed impossible she stopped time. Her body was no longer a body, but a surface. Marble. An illusion of permanence in an age of immediacy.

Is it still fashion, or is it already performance art? This question comes up with every edition of the MET Gala, but this year it resonated particularly strongly. For many, the theme “Fashion Is Art” served as an excuse for aesthetic experimentation. For Klum, it was the starting point for creating something radical. Instead of interpreting fashion as art, she became art herself.

Inspirations? Not obvious, though deeply rooted in history. The spirit of Raffaello Monti hovered over this look like a delicate veil. Monti, the master of marble illusion, could make stone appear soft, almost breathing. His veiled faces, hidden beneath a stone fabric, balanced on the border between reality and dream. Klum did exactly the same thing, only instead of a chisel, she used her body.

The result? Disturbingly perfect. Her face, hidden beneath a “sculpted” veil, betrayed no emotion, yet drew the eye with almost hypnotic force. Drapings that seemed to flow, though they were motionless. Fabric that wasn’t fabric. This was no longer styling it was an illusion clothed in precision.

And suddenly everything became clear. This was neither a whim nor an extension of the Halloween obsession for which Klum is famous. It was a consequence. For years, she has treated the body as a canvas and fashion as a tool of transformation. The difference is that this time, instead of shocking, she contemplated.

In an era where fashion often screams, Klum chose silence. Marble like, cool, almost sacred. And that is precisely why her presence was so resonant.
Because true fashion isn’t about being seen. It’s about being remembered.

Photos: Heidi Klum na MET Gali 2026, fot. Matt Winkelmeyer/MG26/Getty Images, Instagram @heidiklum

 

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THE VANITY EXHIBITION: MET GALA

It always takes place on the first Monday in May a ritual more predictable than shifts in fast fashion trends and more exclusive than anything that merely pretends to be exclusive. This year, it falls on May 4. Seemingly a date like any other, and yet it is on this very evening that New York transforms into a runway, where clothing ceases to be clothing and becomes a statement. Or at least an aspiration toward one.

In 1948, no one was talking about the show. It was a dinner party. Eleanor Lambert, a woman who understood fashion before fashion began to understand itself, organized an event that was meant to be practical: to raise funds for the newly established Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No dramatic trains trailing down the stairs, no outfits requiring a team of engineers and logistics. A dress was a dress. A suit was a suit. And money how cliché was the goal.

Today, the Costume Institute is a temple. Over 33,000 objects, seven centuries of history, fabrics that have outlived empires, and styles that have endured longer than many a cultural movement. Conservation labs, a library off limits to the average mortal, and access reserved for the select few: researchers, students, and designers. Fashion in its most paradoxical form as something simultaneously fleeting and archival, mundane and sacred.

However, the Met Gala wasn’t always what it is today. For years, it remained a local event, confined to New York’s elite circles. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a transformation took place, and as is often the case in fashion, we owe it all to one woman: Diana Vreeland. She was the former editor in chief of Vogue, a visionary, and a curator of fantasy. It was she who introduced the theme, turning the dinner into a narrative, and the narrative into a spectacle. The first theme? A tribute to Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1973, a year after his death. A symbolic beginning: fashion begins to tell its own story.

From that moment on, everything spiraled out of control in the best possible way, of course. The freedom designers, stylists, and celebrities have to interpret the theme has created a space where the line between genius and absurdity is almost invisible. Some are viewed with admiration, others with consternation, and most with a mix of both emotions. Because the Met Gala isn’t a fashion show. It’s theater. Sometimes an opera. Sometimes a farce.

This year’s theme: Fashion Is Art, and the exhibition: Costume Art. It sounds like something you have to say out loud to believe it makes sense. The relationship between clothing and the body is a topic as old as fashion itself, yet it’s still treated like the discovery of the season. Does clothing exist without the body? Does the body exist without the context provided by an outfit? Or perhaps both are just a pretext for a story about power, identity, and control? Fashion loves to ask questions it has no intention of answering.

This year, however, something is emerging that seeks to push boundaries not aesthetic ones, but social ones. For the first time in the Met Gala’s 78-year history, the outfits will be presented on mannequins inspired by real, diverse bodies. Not perfect, not retouched, not conforming to a single standard. Bodies with disabilities, pregnant bodies, bodies that for decades have been, at best, a metaphor in fashion. It is a gesture that can easily be seen as groundbreaking or, just as easily, as decades too late. Fashion is once again trying to catch up with a reality it has ignored for years.

And then we return to the numbers, because they best reveal the true nature of this “vanity fair.” In 1948, a ticket cost $85. In 2025, $75,000 per person. A table? Starting at $350,000. The celebrities, of course, don’t pay; they’re invited, dressed, and sponsored. Their presence is the currency. In 2025, the gala generated $30 million in revenue. Philanthropy at its most luxurious, the kind that requires the right lighting and a red carpet.

This year’s honorary co-chairs, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, fit perfectly into this narrative. Money meets fashion, fashion meets power, and together they pretend it’s all about art. Controversy? Of course. Because it’s hard to separate the spectacle from the context in which it’s created. And maybe that’s exactly the point so that no one feels entirely comfortable, even if they’re wearing a dress worth more than an apartment.

The Met Gala has never been just about clothes. It’s an event about who gets to be seen, who gets to speak, and who can afford to pretend that none of it matters.

And the ending? Like any good story about fashion, there isn’t one. Because when the lights go out and the stairs empty, only one question remains: was it art, or just a very expensive illusion that we all agreed to believe in for a moment? Like a photograph from years ago, where everyone looks elegant, but no one knows yet that it’s already in the past.

And perhaps that is precisely why the Met Gala still fascinates us not for what it is, but for what it once could have been.

Photos:
Met Gala, circa 1960
The Costume Institute Benefit, 1948

Photographs:
Penske Media (Contributor), Getty Images
United States Information Agency, PhotoQuest, Getty Images
Ben Martin, Getty Images
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Kevin Mazur / MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum / Vogue
Press materials
Photo: Paul Westlake
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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ON THE EDGE: MUSEUM, FASHION, AND NUDITY

There are moments in fashion that do not simply enter history they redefine it. This shift rarely happens through seasonal trends or dramatic silhouettes, but through ideas: fragile, fleeting, yet surprisingly enduring. Today, fashion finds itself in precisely such a moment, centered around the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the phrase “Fashion is Art” becomes less a statement and more a working language of interpretation.

Within this framework, the body re-emerges as both object and symbol. It is no longer read only through clothing, but through material, structure, and illusion. Curator Andrew Bolton shapes this narrative with a clear shift in focus from surface to experience, from image to presence. Fashion, in this reading, is not something to look at. It is something to encounter.

A central role in this conversation is played by a suit from Y/Project. At first glance, it appears to belong to the language of classic menswear tailoring controlled, familiar, almost conservative. But that impression dissolves quickly. The fabric begins to reveal something else.

Across its surface appears a naked body neither symbolic nor stylized, but rendered with striking photographic precision. This is not decoration. It is not ornament. It is a constructed illusion.

Created by Glenn Martens in collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier, the piece operates through trompe l’oeil. Yet rather than simply playing with perception, it redirects attention toward more fundamental questions: what do we see, and what is actually there? The viewer is suspended between garment and body, surface and truth.

This tension becomes even clearer when the suit is placed alongside the ancient sculpture of Diadoumenos. The marble figure, rooted in classical ideals of proportion and beauty, meets a contemporary interpretation of the body flat, printed, yet unexpectedly physical in its presence.

The dialogue between them is not about contrast, but continuity. Both works are concerned with the same question: how the body is represented, idealized, and reimagined across time. One is carved in stone, the other in fabric and image, yet both function as cultural constructions of the human form.

To understand this gesture, it is necessary to return to earlier experiments with illusion in fashion. Elsa Schiaparelli was already dissolving boundaries between object and imagination, collaborating with Salvador Dalí to introduce surrealism into clothing.

Meanwhile, Méret Oppenheim transformed everyday objects into unsettling hybrids of familiarity and discomfort. Within this lineage, Jean Paul Gaultier extended the logic further placing the body itself at the center of illusion.

His 1990s collections did not simply reference nudity. They displaced it onto the surface of clothing.

The contemporary reading developed by Glenn Martens pushes this even further. The body is no longer an external reference it becomes embedded within the garment itself. Yet this body is never neutral. It is constructed, coded, and shaped by cultural ideals of masculinity and form.

Here, an irony emerges. What appears to affirm a classical ideal simultaneously destabilizes it. By transferring the naked body onto the suit’s surface, the designers do not simply expose it they stage it, turning it into an object of scrutiny, tension, and ambiguity.

Seen in a wider context, the Y/Project suit becomes part of a longer history of negotiation between body and representation. This history predates museums, fashion institutions, and even the modern idea of art itself. It begins at the point where clothing was necessity, and visual culture was still forming its language.

The exhibition suggests that these domains have never truly been separate. They overlap constantly borrowing, reflecting, and redefining each other.

Paradoxically, it is through such radical gestures that fashion regains depth. It stops functioning solely as a response to market cycles and begins to operate as a form of critical reflection. The Met Gala 2026 does not impose a single aesthetic direction. Instead, it opens a field of questions: about the body, identity, and the limits of representation.

And within that field, one object captures the tension most precisely a seemingly classic suit that is, in fact, something far more unstable than clothing.

Photos: Peter White/Getty Images, press materials, WWD, Courtesy of The Met

 

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NAKED SHOES: CHANEL'S NEW AESTHETIC

In fashion, things rarely truly disappear; even if a form becomes lighter, more transparent, or nearly imperceptible, a trace of its meaning always remains. This was the case with the “naked dress,” which over the years ceased to be merely a dress and became a language of the body, visibility, and control over the gaze. Now, at the Chanel Resort 2027 show in Biarritz, Matthieu Blazy seems to be taking this logic even further. It is no longer about revealing skin. It is about the near total withdrawal of the object itself.

On the Chanel runway, footwear ceases to fulfill its obvious function. Instead of classic shoes, we see designs that hover on the border between presence and absence delicate straps wrapping around the ankle, subtle structures supporting the heel as if the entire form had been reduced to a gesture. The sole disappears, the weight is suspended, and the foot suddenly becomes visible in a way that is both natural and unsettling. These are not bare feet, but their illusion something between a shoe and its absence.

Although the effect seems radical, its roots are deeply embedded in Chanel’s history. From the very beginning, the brand built its aesthetic around the idea of freedom freedom from constraints, from stiffness, from anything that restricted movement. Gabrielle Chanel’s early designs responded to the need for a lighter, more natural way of life, one connected to the body in motion. Biarritz, where the show took place, is therefore no coincidence it is a space that evokes the freedom of the seaside, the wind, and the light, so close to Chanel’s original vision.

In this context, “disappearing shoes” are not a break with tradition, but rather its extreme evolution. The classic models with contrasting toes, which defined the fashion house for decades, were based on a balance between function and aesthetics. Blazy shatters this balance, leaving only a fragment of the shoe a hint that suggests footwear more than it actually is.

This is part of a broader shift that the fashion world has been observing for several seasons now: a move toward minimalism, dematerialization, and an aesthetic of understatement. Shoes are becoming thinner, more conceptual, and at times almost invisible. Chanel takes this process to the extreme, where footwear doesn’t so much simplify as it dissolves into its own concept.

The effect is mesmerizing, because suddenly the focus shifts from the object to the body. The exposed foot its arch, its tension, the way it engages with space becomes the focal point of the entire composition. What is usually hidden and taken for granted is brought to the forefront, as if fashion had suddenly stopped covering up and started dismantling.

Of course, the question remains about function, about wearability, about everyday life. But perhaps that is no longer the right perspective. The “naked shoe” is not about utility in the classical sense. It is about shifting the boundary to the moment when the shoe ceases to be an object and becomes the idea of its presence.

What remains in the end is an image that is hard to shake from memory: a foot that is almost bare, yet surrounded by a delicate structure that suggests footwear more than it actually is. It is fashion in a state of limbo between existence and its absence. 

And perhaps that is precisely why the “naked shoe” has such a powerful impact. It does not answer the question of what a shoe is. Rather, it disarms it.

And if the “naked dress” taught us to look at the body differently, then the “naked shoe” may teach us something even more unsettling: that even the most functional aspect of fashion can become merely a memory of its own form.

Photos: Press materials

 

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