With this year’s Met Gala, in all its heretical glory, solidly in our rearview, we—your humble DirtCast hosts—decided to take a closer look at this curious cultural institution and its role in the celebrity ecosystem.
What is technically a fundraiser for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Musuem of Art has become a wild collision of fashion’s old guard and celebrity youth culture. Anna Wintour, doyenne of the Met Ball, rules the roost and manages the guest list, but has had to yield in recent years to the changing of the cultural tide. To discuss this subject with the vim and vigor it deserves, we turned to Jezebel’s resident fashion expert and deputy editor Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, for this week’s episode “Smoking in the Bathroom at the Met”—a title that refers to a real thing that happened at last year’s Met Gala and is also a fond tribute to friends of the podcast Matt and Viviana of the THINK 1994 Museum, who curated a “Celebrities Smoking in the Bathroom at the Met Gala” exhibit that was, by all accounts, amazing.