It seems there’s a thing called the Met Gala. The two words together are very slightly familiar, but I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to it. Hadley Freeman was caught in Manhattan last week while the Gala was galaing.

What was once a low-key fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan has become an annual warning about the dangers of being too rich, too thin and too obsessed with Instagram. Every year there’s a jaunty dress code “theme” — shudder — but most of the female celebrities simply do what they always do at these things, which is look as naked and/or uncomfortable as possible.

Ya. That’s a thing that’s been bugging me forever – as in, the whole of my adult life. Why do women still do that? Feminism is a thing, and has been for decades. Why, then, do women’s clothes just get more and more insultingly impractical and torturous and sex-focused? Why do women’s clothes look as if they’re designed by pimps while men’s clothes don’t? Why don’t women refuse?

What I couldn’t cope with was the homogeneity of the bodies and faces. Even in a year that was ostensibly meant to celebrate “diversity”, the women at the Met Ball were all shrinking to a vanishing point, their faces so smooth it’s impossible to tell anyone’s age any more. Is Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian Klan, 20 years old? Fifty? I’d believe either. Anne Hathaway looked as if she’d been drawn by AI. Demi Moore’s clavicles were more prominent than her facial features. And yet, it’s considered “body-shaming” to notice what is being thrust in front of our faces, and so, in the name of diversity, we all have to pretend we are blind and that it’s totally normal that twentysomethings are full of fillers and fiftysomethings have no body fat. 

And we all have to pretend it’s fine that women must represent Sex while men get to represent Work or Cultivated Leisure. We all have to pretend not to notice that that divides the sexes into the consumer and the consumed, the subject and the object. Women have to dress for the male gaze, men have to dress as the sturdy male gazer. Women’s clothes might fall off at any moment, men’s clothes are firmly secured. Who agreed to this arrangement? Why didn’t it get canceled at least half a century ago?

It’s a branch of anthropology I find peculiarly irritating.

Once artists rebelled against old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and femininity, like Boy George, KD Lang and Madonna. Now those who don’t fit into today’s Kardashianised mould of celebrity beauty, such as Ramsey, Sam Smith, Emma Corrin and so on, describe themselves as “non-binary”, as if not having pumped-up breasts or biceps de-sexes them. The irony of the “non-binary” term is it reinforces today’s binary ideas about how women and men should look and behave.

So women have two choices: torture-clothes or trendy bullshit.