Ghaddafi Wants The Met To Showcase His "Breathtaking Sartorial Magnificence"

By Jenna Sauers | April 26, 2011 | 4:52pm

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Someone named Zainab Bint Abu Talib, an aide at the Libyan ministry of cultural affairs, wrote a letter to the New York Times and the Metropolitan Museum of Art offering up — or, rather, totally assuming the aforementioned parties’ interest in — “a retrospective in 2013 of Colonel Ghaddafi’s four decades of superior dress sense.” For you see, Libya under Ghaddafi‘s leadership has not only been “transformed…into one of the most prosperous and progressive nations in Africa and the Middle East,” but Ghaddafi himself “has been at the fashion forefront for much of the African/Arab world.” Ghaddafi has “over 3400 items of breathtaking sartorial magnificence” to lend the Met. The letter goes on:

Indeed many of his clothes have been featured in global magazines from the hundreds of state visits and functions he has hosted over the years for world leaders. All of whom are in agreement, ahumdillah, that our President is one of the very best dressed men of the last half century…It is not only African and Arab leaders who have been influenced by his style and substance but many western rock stars and celebrities who have also been won over by the Ghaddafi look: most notably Michael Jackson in the late 1980’s copied the signature motif military style of our leader to great chart success on his own terms.

Michael, apparently, never wore anything military-inspired until the Colonel made it cool. The Times‘ Horacio Silva declined the Libyan government’s kind offer of a trip to Tripoli to check out the goods. [T]

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