Written by Anisha Shinde
When the Met’s Costume Institute unveiled this year’s theme, “Costume Art,” the question it wanted us to sit with was a familiar one: is fashion art? It’s the type of question institutions love to ask because it sounds provocative without costing them anything. But this time, nobody sat with it for long, because the guest list raised a different, far less comfortable question. When Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez were named the honorary co-chairs, the internet did not debate the merits of costume-as-art; instead, it asked: who is fashion for now?
That reaction revealed something the exhibit never intended to: one of fashion’s biggest cultural stages isn’t really delving into who gets to define art anymore; it’s asking who can pay the most for the room where that conversation happens. And increasingly, the answer is whoever has the most disposable capital, regardless of what they’ve contributed to the culture they now get to preside over.
However, this isn’t exactly new or inherently sinister — museums and their glittering fundraisers have always needed someone with deep pockets to foot the bill, and that was never going to be a purely altruistic arrangement. What’s different here is how visible that somebody is now. Old money had the benefit of time; a century of distance can make a fortune feel less like capital and more like “taste,” simply because nobody alive remembers how it was made. A fortune as recent and legible as Bezos’s doesn’t get that kind of luxury.
In this piece, what’s being contested isn’t Bezos’s presence at a party, but whether fashion is allowed to continue pretending its highest table is about curation when it’s plainly about capital. The “is fashion art” framing was always a bit of a decoy; the real question this year was who’s still willing to fund the illusion, and what they expect to get from that funding. Cultural legitimacy, mostly. A seat at a table that photographs well. The Met Gala doesn’t simply showcase fashion — it also launders wealth into taste, live, on a red carpet, once a year.
But why is this relevant? Well, it appears that none of this stays at the Met. It filters all the way down to how we, as students with a fraction of that capital, are meant to relate to fashion at all. If the industry’s biggest night has quietly become as much a display of tech wealth as it is a celebration of craft, can fashion still be something you can meaningfully participate in on a budget, with taste alone? It’s hard to feel like an active participant in a culture whose front door is currently being held open by the fourth-richest man alive. So, at some point, our aspirations have curdled into spectatorship.
To conclude, maybe the exhibit’s question was never really “is fashion art?” Maybe the answer was never on the runway at all, but in the sponsor list. So here’s something worth sitting with instead: every time you scroll past a Met Gala look, a campaign, or an “it girl” outfit of the week, ask who’s actually paying for the version of fashion you’re being shown, and what they’re getting out of you watching. This is not a reason to disengage from fashion; it’s just a reminder that the most expensive thing in the room is never the outfit — it’s your attention.
