NYT on Met Gala: If You Don’t Like It, Shut Up

New York Times (5/4/26): “The Costume Institute is important for preserving the history of fashion as a decorative art form, and that outweighs the whining.”

Plenty of people felt that the Met Gala, a celebration of wealth and celebrity—where a ticket cost $100,000 and a table $350,000—was painfully tone deaf right now as our country spends billions of dollars to attack other countries and bankroll a genocide, people are being snatched off the street and sent to camps, and the White House goes after anyone who says anything about it they don’t like.

That the event was sponsored this year by megabillionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who were also designated honorary co-chairs, a position traditionally reserved for artists and celebrities, took it even more over the top. As blogger Ali McIntyre (alimcforever, 5/5/26) put it:

Critics cited Bezos’ Amazon for documented labor violations, for providing cloud infrastructure to ICE immigration enforcement operations, for his intervention at the Washington Post suppressing editorial independence, and for his $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund. The Observer noted the Gala was “entering its billionaire era”—as if it had ever left.

The New York Times (5/4/26) had a hot take: That’s just resentment. According to Vanessa Friedman, the paper’s fashion director and chief fashion critic:

Bezos has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious wealth in America, just as the Met Gala has become the embodiment of a certain kind of egregious elevation of wealth and celebrity, and that makes them useful targets for a lot of current rage and unrest.

Friedman knows people’s “whining” is silly, because “even people who criticize the Met Gala end up looking at the pictures.”

And she’s got an answer, which presumably could apply to just about anything people oppose: “If people who criticize the Met Gala want it to end, they should just stop talking about it.”

Featured image: Jeff Bezos and  Lauren Sánchez Bezos at the Met Gala (Business Insider, 5/7/26).