NYPD protects Met Gala from anti-Israel mob
On the first Monday of May, Anna Wintour offered a rare apology. Although her annual Met Gala made money for the Costume Institute’s marquee exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” Wintour asked the guest list of influencers and billionaires to dress in accordance with the theme “Garden of Time.”
“When we came up with the title ‘Sleeping Beauties,’ it’s wonderful and poetic and romantic, but actually, it could be many, many things,” Wintour said on the Today show ahead of the gala. “I said, ‘What are we gonna say to people to wear to this night?’ And [Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton] said, ‘Well, what about ‘Garden of Time?’” Wintour shared. “So, I fear that we’ve unleashed a lot of confusion out there, and for which I deeply apologize. I imagine we’ll see a lot of flowers.”
Indeed, society doyennes and debutantes took the theme literally, dressing in peplum posies and custom couture, but most importantly dozens of carats of diamonds per VIP, including nearly 100 carats on Jennifer Lopez alone.
Outside the gates, guests would have been better off actually reading “The Garden of Time,” the short story.
Written by dystopian novelist J.G. Ballard, the 1962 narrative tells of a wealthy and cultured count and his wife who live in the eponymous garden, which cordons them off from an angry mob. The protagonists pluck translucent, crystal “time flowers” that slow the mob’s incursion, but the finite supply of flowers shrinks, and by the time the mob closes in, it finds the count’s library toppled, music room destroyed, and paintings smashed.
A similar mob came for the Met on Monday, but the New York Police Department was quick to arrest 27 pro-Hamas protesters, lest Jeff Bezos and Kim Kardashian have to share the last of their Campari. Around the rest of the city, the plebians lack such protection of the “Garden of Time.”
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Kitty-corner from Central Park in Morningside Heights, neither the students nor the staff scored such urgent protection from the NYPD. It took more than 30 hours for Columbia University to allow law enforcement to enter campus after anti-Israeli occupiers established their first round of encampments, but it took another two weeks when the wealthy rebels without any real cause took buildings — and a janitor — hostage for the police to close the encampments completely.
The Marchesa and martinis housed by the Met Gala may be a little less sophisticated and culturally valuable than the Mozart within the Garden of Time, but the mobs outside both are equally bloodthirsty. Both prioritize destruction of the West and the art it creates over any productive goal of a “Free Palestine,” and both will come to the gates in the end. Only in the late-stage dystopia of Wintour’s costume party do the elite really believe that the revolution will not ultimately eat its own.
