The failure of Devil Wears Prada 2 hung like a dark cloud over the Met Gala this year. Not a commercial failure, for the film is minting millions, but a failure that broke the central illusion of the franchise: that the fashion industry and fashion journalism are vital and, perhaps, even essential to our affective and material lives.

Whether we agree with that central illusion or not, the first film went ham in, successfully, trying to establish that as cinematic fact. There, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), a character roughly sketched on Vogue America’s infamously cutting editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, is at the helm of Runway magazine, the bible for fashion designers and the fulcrum around which the industry runs. Andy Sachs is the ingénue who, after dismissing Runway’s work and fashion at large as frivolous, comes into her own.

The famous “cerulean” scene was essential not just in cutting Andy’s ego down to size but in reframing the fashion industry’s glamour as essential, outlining the soft power with which it leaves its impression on our daily lives: Andy can strut to a store and pull up a sweater of any colour, but even the presence of that colour itself is the downstream effect of the fashion runway.

Strange, then, to emerge from the film’s sequel wondering if fashion even matters. The film has Miranda and Andy trying to prevent Runway from being taken over and sold for parts. But after the song and dance, the scheming and scrambling, after Runway is eventually salvaged from an athleisure bro-billionaire with the help of another virtuous billionaire, the question lingers, why does Runway even need to exist?

The most cynical response is, merely, for Miranda and Andy to remain employed, and the film even goes so far as to make this case when Miranda tells Andy that all her work to keep the magazine afloat was, in large part, to keep her career afloat.

A fickle stage

The fashion world in which the film is embedded becomes a fickle and gold-enamelled stage, whose presence is reduced to its image, not its idea, as the first film attempted to argue. Fashion is all image; fashion is only image, the degradation, as Guy Deobard writes, from being to having to appearing. Being cannot be monetised. Appearing can.

The resonance of the film with what is happening to Vogue and the Met Gala is impossible to shake off. Bloated with references to corporate takeovers, magazines choked with advertisements, the preference for “vendors” over “visionaries”, and the reigning and disproportionate importance of social media, the film draws its existential anxieties heavily from what is actually happening.

Lauren Sánchez Bezos and her husband, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, were honorary chairs of the Met Gala, which Wintour has chaired since 1995. This was possible for Bezos swooped in, reportedly pumping in $10 million. It is worth noting that a day after Wintour stepped down as the editor-in-chief of Vogue America, they published the digital cover story featuring Lauren in her wedding dress. Rumour has it that Bezos is interested in purchasing Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue.

It is important to make a subtle distinction here. Capital is always the bedrock of events like the Met Gala, though it masks itself as “cultural capital”, with the people invited as chairs, often luminaries of the art world. Bezos’ blatant involvement merely unmasks this by taking cultural capital to its logical conclusion: financial capital. It also makes clear what is apparent: that culture, especially high culture, can only exist with patronage. 

Culture is tainted by the same blood that streaks the capital that fuels its engine—it only matters how little or how much of this is apparent.

It is precisely why gestures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slapping “Tax The Rich” in red on her white gown, like blood, in the Met Gala party feel hollow, like chipping at marble with a toothpick, pretending it is a pickaxe.

For her Met Gala look, Lauren referenced John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, casting herself in the role of Madame X, a 19th century young American socialite, wife to a Parisian banker—basically the outsider who has come and stirred a storm in the porcelain teacup world of unchecked wealth.

Sargent had painted the portrait with a strap of the dress falling off the shoulder, which caused a scandal, forcing him to repaint the strap back on. Lauren’s strap, too, slipped off her shoulder; she was imagining herself into a scandal, not realising that to slip into a scandalous story one needs to have the mettle for scandal.

Talk around Met Gala

Understandably, there is paralysis in the discourse surrounding the Met Gala. There are those who are arguing against the structure itself: unchecked wealth and tech feudalism, Bezos’ Amazon empire being hand in glove with ICE, the controversial US government immigration agency, and also complicit in the genocide in Gaza.

Then, there are those who, having taken the structure for granted, are arguing about the taste: who wore what best, who disappointed, and why Chanel was racist for doing Bhavitha Mandava dirty, she being their first Indian global ambassador, by dressing her up in a look incongruous with the glamorous stage.

And then there are those who, taking taste for granted, are arguing about those arguing about taste. About whether the almost universal dislike for Lauren has something to do with her being “new money” and our feudal-pilled minds imagining that wealth needs to be spent a certain way, which people like Lauren and the Ambanis are flouting by throwing it in our faces.

With every new tier of discourse, certain pressing questions get ignored or, worse, are assumed to be resolved. That is how discourse moves forward—or congeals outward. Moving from the question of structure to that of taste, an essential bedrock question gets flung to the side: can beauty exist outside of this beauty-industrial complex?

How does one speak of Isha Ambani’s look, among the most expensive, with diamonds from her family collection stitched into a blouse? The glistening Sarpech, once owned by the Nizam of Hyderabad, placed on the blouse’s back, drove historians and archivists mad. Isha also carried a Subodh Gupta mango sculpture, shaded meticulously to look not just real but succulent. Gupta claimed it was a play on aam—as in mango but also as in common people—because common people can only exist as wordplay on such a glamorous stage. He also refused to say how much it was worth (Rs.90 lakh, reportedly).

These moments institute the belief that to experience beauty we need to relinquish our moral compass. We are locked into our class category and the anxieties and ambitions that emanate from that position by desiring a kind of beauty.

The more we think about taste, without critically examining the structure of the beauty-industrial complex from which it has emerged, the more we implicitly assume that beauty can only emerge from that bastion.

Beauty and parody

The only way to exist outside of it is, perhaps, through parody. So, when Urfi Javed or Nancy Tyagi attempt something at a slight angle—courting the outrageous or the DIY aesthetic—they perform parodies of this world by trying to imagine beauty outside of it. Those who celebrate these figures show a patronising affection, perhaps, because they know you cannot perform beauty outside the beauty-industrial complex.

Does a belief in beauty have to, necessarily, revoke one’s belief in a more just world? Can beauty exist outside of capitalism, beauty that is not parody, not quietism, not defeatism?

These discourses coagulate on one another, and it is impossible to extricate the “Ate/Chop” votes from the desire to abolish billionaires from the person in bed in pyjamas confidently commenting on the outfits from the slides explaining the inherent classism in the new money/old money discourse. It has all been flattened. The spectacle has been flattened, the absurd has been domesticated, the morality has been given rabid clarity on the same Instagram feed so that spectacle, its criticism, and counter-criticism, all can be digested simultaneously and quickly, with little or no aftertaste, and certainly no afterlife.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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