Met Ballard

The Met Gala is a fashion event, and consequently I have next to no interest in it, because as a general rule I do not give a good goddamn about fashion so the Gala doesn’t attract me. Indeed, I don’t think I even knew anything about it before watching this video about it:

I wish JJ would come back to YT, cos her stuff was fun. Anyway, I am absolutely not a style icon by any stretch of the imagination; I am about basic black in everything—band t-shirts are about as colourful as I get and most of the ones I have are just white on black designs—and comfort above all, and if I don’t care about dressing up for myself, I generally don’t care too much about other people doing it.

Now, the Met Gala is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s costume department—last year it cost seventy-five thousand dollars to attend, and even that was only if Anna Wintour invited you in the first place; it’s for a good enough cause, I suppose, but for fuck’s sake—and each year there’s a theme tied in with whatever the Costume Institute is exhibiting at the time. You don’t have to dress accordingly, but it’s expected that you will. Consequently, the Met Gala strikes me primarily as a load of absurdly well-off people dressing up stupidly in public, and I don’t really care that much…

…Except that this year, the theme was a story by J.G. Ballard.

WHAT?

The story can be read here, and revolves around an aging aristocrat and his wife, about to be beset by raging mobs. However, Count Axel has flowers in his garden that can turn back time a certain amount when they’re plucked and thereby he holds back the advance of said mobs. But nothing lasts forever, though. It’s a neat story with a really neat idea, but I suspect Jim Ballard would have found it an incomprehensible idea for a fashion theme as I do…

…And if I didn’t understand it, I’m not sure some of the attendees really did either… I mean, the story’s not about flowers as such, is it? But that seems to have been the easiest way to live up to the “Garden of Time” theme… I don’t know, I’m just perplexed by the very idea of any Ballard story becoming the basis for something like the Met Gala (parenthetically, People Online are outraged, obviously, that the event is happening at all while Israel is wiping out Palestine, but frankly, if we stopped doing everything like this while there’s an atrocity happening somewhere on Earth we’d stop doing anything at all), though I do rather like the idea that someone who’s never heard of Ballard before might now actually read something by him (“ooh, this one’s about cars, that sounds like fun…”). Could you imagine, though, if whoever decided on the theme for this year’s ball picked another Ballard story like Crash or The Unlimited Dream Company or The Atrocity Exhibition? I think even I might watch that…