The truth about the Met Gala

This week in my Moodring roundup: a roach steals the red carpet; leave Lukas Gage alone; Buckingham Palace's guest towels.

The truth about everything* is different every week! And this week, it’s the turn of MOODRING – waspish, yet very tongue-in-cheek mini essays on the world at large.

MET GALA

Such is the aggressive velocity of the turnover of celebrity news, by the time you read this, the 2023 Met Gala will already be lost to the mists of time, like the completion of the Pyramids, or the original Pippa from Home and Away. As I age and wither, I find most celebrities quite… uninspiring. Many are the children of people who were famous when I was young, so I feel I’ve already lived their stories. I read about their births in Heat magazine in the 00s while waiting for my microwave dinners to ping; I’ve watched the velvety hands of nepotism guide them into superstardom, and rope off everyone else. I’m tired. There is nothing left to surprise me. Zero allure. And yet I feel compelled to write about the Met Gala, which is exactly what it wants. The Met Gala is the school pest in the row behind you who tugs at your pigtails even though they’re in love with you. Go on, it says, turn around; don’t think I won’t pull them again.

Unlike most other star-studded events, whose red carpets serve as appetisers to the point of the evening – gongs being given out, films to be premiered, whatever – Met Gala nakedly admits its whole raison d’être is to be stared at. The carpet is the kernel. Oh, sure, there’s a charity element and an exhibition to open and canapé waiters darting around the place like midges on a Scottish campsite, but the real deal happens outside, its aim to choke your social media feeds until they say the safe word – which it ignores.

haltamoda

A post shared by Fashion Enthusiast (@haltamoda)

Also setting it apart from other tired shindigs is that it’s not only viewers at home left drooling into their insecurities. The Met Gala is competitive dressing, jousting in all but name, as the famous and notorious scan each other’s looks, instantly working out which of their rivals will claim more space or virality in the accompanying breathless coverage. An army of Becky Sharps with rumbling bellies and a rapidly draining phone battery. The Met Gala is the Mean Girls of the celebrity circuit, a display of wealth, status and exercise regime, denying us even the pleasure of criticising their outfits too hard because the whole point is to dress kind of weird, ugly even. The most you can say is ‘this doesn’t fit the theme’ – remember the year of ‘camp’, monstrously dim – or that someone looks boring. Nobody ever looks truly hideous. Not that it stops us pontificating from our armchairs. Masquerading as a celebration of fashion, the Met Gala is a study in envy. Who among us didn’t watch Simon Porte Jacquemus and Bad Bunny’s exposed, toned latissimi dorsi rippling like Windermere at midsummer and wish we too could wear something daring and backless without being harpooned or having sailors find safe passage to the Azores using only the night sky and our backne?

At a night celebrating renowned acerbic fatphobe Karl Lagerfeld, it’s perhaps fitting the true star of the gala was not Jared Leto’s tryhard cosplay as the designer's beloved moggy Choupette, but a lone cockroach scuttling on the red carpet. It’s often said cockroaches would survive the nuclear apocalypse, and perhaps this young insect was in training for such oblivion – if you can survive the paparazzi clamouring for closeups of Pedro Pascal’s boy-scout shorts or Maluma dressed like a receptionist in a Chiswick beauty spa, then perhaps global annihilation wouldn’t be so bad.

MOOD: Red carpet unready

WHIRLWINDS

Two men got married last week. As much as I’m an opponent of any type of marriage, and as unremarkable a feat as it is now, it still feels good to type that – guys can marry each other, great. The guys in question were actor Lukas Gage – ferociously rimmed in The White Lotus and annoying the hell out of Penn Badgely in You – and celebrity hairdresser Chris Appleton. Much of the coverage was not the usual #LoveIsLove guff that most liberal straight people afford us when we publicly assert our sexuality, nor even that Kim Kardashian officiated, but a concern it was all happening ‘very fast’. Nothing like a queer relationship with an age difference (27 and 39) to get the village elders of the internet frothing and readying the ducking stool.

chrisappleton1

A post shared by Chris Appleton (@chrisappleton1)

Like Paul Mescal’s nosebleed ascent post-lockdown, Gage has enjoyed a rocket launch into fame that few could’ve predicted when he first went viral after TV director Tristram Shapeero was caught expressing his ‘sympathies’ for Gage’s living situation when he thought he was on mute over a Zoom audition. Lukas and Chris’s romance first emerged when they soft-launched on social media in February which, okay, isn’t that long ago, but it does seem a little rich to be clutching pearls when one of the most popular shows among many commentators expressing their surprise is Married At First Sight, which hosts weddings of people who have NEVER met before. What’s interesting about the slow trickle of marriage equality across the world is how it’s made people reevaluate, and attempt to gatekeep, the institution. Often, those who’ve had access to it since time immemorial suddenly feel an urge to protect its alleged sanctity or its traditions, even though they’ve trampled over such conventions for centuries, to suit them – divorce was not invented for queer people after all, darlings. Is it too fast? Why? Who cares? Straight people have been trivialising marriage for centuries, why shouldn’t we?

But on a serious note, there’s a saying that goes ‘when you know, you know’. Is marriage a big commitment? Only if you haven’t saved up enough cash for a divorce. I suppose you’re committing to the reception venue, and the catering when you’re ordering the centrepiece of your beige, flaky, processed-meat stuffed carbageddon buffet: a towering prawn vol-au-vent recreation of the Shard. But what happens after that is up to you, even if you have children. A wedding is a party with a gravitas it can never live up to. Marriage is symbolic, yes, but it doesn’t have to mean anything other than ‘right now, this is how we feel and this is what we’re doing’. Maybe if more people took this approach to marriage, more unions would last longer. What’s the magic milestone you must pass to earn your right to get married? One year? Two?

And given that right-wingers are heralding a rollback of reproductive rights and toying with trans people’s lives in the name of culture wars, you can’t blame any queer couple grabbing the opportunity to make it ‘official’ while they can. As a gay man, I reserve the right to locate the shallowest waters, so I’d say our greatest concern should be not the couple’s commitment to one another but the aesthetics. I suppose it’s always the same when you marry a tradesman: builders’ homes are cursed with unfinished loft conversions, electricians’ houses are overrun by exposed wires and fizzing light switches, and so too is Lukas Gage suffering the plight of a hairdresser’s spouse – at the wedding, the handsome young actor’s hair looked like it had been straightened using a George Foreman grill. For goodness’ sake, get these boys some heat protection spray, then leave them the hell alone.

MOOD: Dry and damaged

Before we carry on, a reminder that the ebook of my latest novel THE FAKE-UP is 99p for a limited time only. You can get it on Kindle, or Apple Books. Paperback is coming 18 May.

Also, I reviewed the Guardian Blind Date this week, and only one of them was wearing shoes. And even then, it was only one shoe. READ NOW

ENCORE: PRINCE HARRY