Dan Ahwa: Is The Met Gala Theme ‘The Garden Of Time’ Tone-Deaf Or Genius?

J.G. Ballard’s short story The Garden of Time ironically explores Arcadian splendour against a “great unwashed” riot.

Crash. The Drowned World. The Atrocity Exhibition. Why I Want to F*** Ronald Regan.

These are just some of the titles of the late English novelist and satirist James Graham Ballard’s (pen name J.G. Ballard) provocative works of fiction, a writer synonymous with a dystopian viewpoint, writing about reoccurring themes of technology, mass media and sex. It’s a point of view that’s been given its own moniker: Ballardrian, an umbrella term to describe the author’s dark psychological perspective.

His 1973 novel Crash has inspired everyone from Madonna to former Moschino creative director Jeremy Scott, the book’s premise centred on car crash fetishists who become sexually aroused by the Hollywood crashes of celebrities like Jayne Mansfield and James Dean. It’s a perverse metaphor explained by Ballard at the time as a wider metaphor of the human experience.

“In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction,” he explained, “dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is a cautionary one, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.”

But what exactly does Ballard’s dystopian stories have to do with this week’s Met Gala?

While most of us know the event as a parade of celebrities wearing borrowed couture and walking up the vertiginous stairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on the first Monday in May, the opening Gala’s dress code this year is directly inspired by Ballard’s 1962 short story The Garden of Time.

In it, Count Axel and his wife live on the sprawling estate of the fictional Palladian Villa, where a crystalline meadow of glassy, so-called “time flowers” magically grow. Beyond the horizon of the property, an angry and riotous mob inch closer to the glorious bubble of the Count’s villa, likened by Ballard to the agonising features of angry, distorted faces often painted by Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

To slow the mob’s progress, the Count picks the head of a flower from the garden to turn back time and slow the mob’s advancement until all the blooms have been picked. When this happens, the angry mob storm the villa, only to find it dilapidated — all that remains among the ruin are two stone statues of the Count and Countess. “The ruin, formerly a spacious villa, barely interrupted the ceaseless tide of humanity,” writes Ballard. “The lake was empty, fallen trees rotting at its bottom, an old bridge rusting into it. Weeds flourished among the long grass in the lawn, overrunning the ornamental pathways and carved stone screens.”

Much like the story of the Count, the Met has been criticised for not reading the room over the years.

In 2022, the dress code of “Gilded Glamour” sat incongruously with the everyday American dealing with inflation and rising gas prices. This year’s theme feels almost outrageous. Like Marie Antoinette shielding herself from an impending revolt and declaring “let them eat cake”, the Met Gala’s very public charity fundraiser also feels like Arcadian splendour against a great unwashed riot.

How does it justify our attention when its tables start from $500,000 and every couture gown in its tens of thousands of dollars is vetted by the hawkeye approval of the Costume Institute’s trustee, artistic director of Condé Nast and editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour?

While the world is facing climate doom, the rising cost of living, and the raging war between Israel and Hamas, does anyone care about the Met Gala’s increasing reminder of how out of touch with reality it has become?

On planet Vogue, a magazine brand that reported a 20 per cent slump in sales last November, the event (arguably the Olympic Games of fashion) is good for its digital pivot, contributing to audience numbers that will help keep the brand going for the rest of the year. In 2023, Vogue Business reported that globally, Vogue’s social channels garnered 114 million engagements, up 713 per cent from the year prior; and Launch Metrics reported the Gala generated $1 billion in media-impact value. In June, Vogue World takes place ahead of the Paris Olympics, another example of the brand turning fashion into entertainment.

This year’s Met Gala co-chairs are another example of Wintour’s uncanny ability to remain relevant by proxy, the 74-year-old surrounding herself with this year’s influential and beautiful co-chairs Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth and Jennifer Lopez, the latter already experiencing backlash online for her out-of-touchness with her approximately $33 million, self-funded, three-part “multimedia project” The Greatest Love Story Never Told.

The event has become a behemoth, and while it has earned the Costume Institute millions of dollars over the years thanks to Wintour’s ability to combine the world of fashion and celebrity into something far more potent, it comes at the expense of the actual cause itself: to raise funds for the Costume Institute, which is the only self-funded department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But then, detractors will always find fashion an easy target for disdain.

It’s an industry of dichotomy; a major polluter yet a major employer. An industry made up of creative minds and innovative thinkers, but inferior to the arts and museums sector. The distraction of celebrity fodder of a Met Gala’s opening night is a mask to the fashion industry’s own collective reckoning when it comes to everything from sustainability to inclusivity. Perhaps it’s okay to have one night in the gilded villa for a good cause. How else will the institute’s 33,000-odd fashion objects and accessories — some dating as far back as the 15th century — be taken care of for future generations to study centuries of human behaviour?

While tomorrow’s Met Gala might seem like a string quartet on the sinking ship that is planet Earth, the audacity of its dress code does feel apt given Ballard’s perverse obsessions with the cult of celebrity, consumerism, conspiracy theories and that thin line between spectacle and violence.

But wait, what will Zendaya wear?

Dan Ahwa is Viva’s fashion and creative director and a senior premium lifestyle journalist for the New Zealand Herald, specialising in fashion, luxury, arts and culture. He is also an award-winning stylist with more than 17 years of experience, and is a co-author and co-curator of The New Zealand Fashion Museum’s Moana Currents: Dressing Aotearoa Now.

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