The full Versailles: Met Gala ruling class pour on the hypocrisy — led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

In the decrepit, doddering Joe Biden era, the odor of decay, decadence, and borrowed glory from the entitled ruling class is the order of the day based on what was seen at last night's Met Gala, "the party of the year," according to the New York Times.

Nobody embodied that better than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wore a custom-designed white evening gown graffitied with "Tax the Rich" in red spray paint on the back of it, just perfect for an event brimming with the super-rich.  She knows they like that "beat me, beat me" vibe and blathered to a credulous press about being there to show "what it means to be working-class women of color at the Met."  Maybe she could have consulted the dark-skinned women at the sidelines, forced to wear masks as she was not, about that one.

Here she is preening and showing it off for the cameras, every inch the center of attention:


Screen shots from videos by NBC New York and The Independent, both via shareable YouTube.

Look at the court lackeys batting around Ocasio-Cortez and fussing with her gown as she makes her "statement" with her at the center of attention.  Sound as if she's the poor working-class brown Latina she claims to be "representing"?  You decide.

The message is a lulu, too.  Tax the rich?  In a room full of some of the richest celebrities in America?  Where a ticket to the event can set you back $35,000 and the menu consists of a Tom Wolfean list of "black rice porcini arancini with pumpkin Calabrian chili sauce, watermelon tart with smoked yuzu soy on Manipuri cracker and collard greens hot chow served on coconut buttermilk cornbread," and "creamy barley with corn, pickled turnips, and roasted maitake, all served on dinnerware from Tory Burch's handpainted Oiseau collection"?  It's like the list of canapés contemplated by Leonard Bernstein in Wolfe's Radical Chic, published in 1970, or the gross-out list of junk foods presented by the Rev. Al Sharpton–like character in its companion piece, Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.  Sure, it looks like Versailles.  But an even better comparison seems to be in the work of Tom Wolfe, who lived to pick apart such hypocrites in the '60s and '70s.  The decadent dynamic is identical.

It reeks of hypocrisy. Some have noticed.

Ocasio-Cortez had this to say, claiming she was representing the working class, and it was all serious, you see.  Here's her Twitter explanation:

And before haters get wild flying off the handle, New York elected officials are routinely invited to and attend the Met due to our responsibilities in overseeing and supporting the city’s cultural institutions for the public. I was one of several in attendance in this evening.рџ¤—

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 14, 2021

Apparently, this consumption fest for the congresswoman is legal, too, based on this loophole Congress wrote in for itself on accepting pricey tickets and maybe gowns, too, for such events.

I researched who made Ocasio-Cortez's gown, a Canada-born designer named Aurora James, who runs an expensive, politically correct "African" tchotchke shop, as well as designs and sells $400–$600 shoes in a chi-chi area of northwest Brooklyn.  She doesn't list gowns in her repertoire, meaning that it was likely custom-made, possibly bought somewhere else, and then spray-painted in her studio.  Whatever the story of it, the gown was not cheap, nor was it available to just anyone.

The preening went on, and the media toadies heaped on the praise sounding like the flattering tailor-charlatans from the Emperor's New Clothes.  (Get a load at this one to gag heartily).  They eat it up, pretending all the nonsense in the sartorial splendor from each celeb trying to draw attention to himself is somehow the cutting edge of fashion as well as the avant-garde of "thought."  The batting flattery reminded me of a scene from Tom Wolfe's 1976 essay, the "The Me Generation":

In September of 1969, in London, on the King's Road, in a restaurant called Alexander's, I happened to have dinner with a group of people that included a young American named Jim Haynes and an Australian woman named Germaine Greer. Neither name meant anything to me at the time, although I never forgot Germaine Greer. She was a thin, hard-looking woman with a tremendous curly electric hairdo and the most outrageous Naugahyde mouth I had ever heard on a woman. (I was shocked.) After a while she got bored and set fire to her hair with a match. Two waiters ran over and began beating the flames out with napkins. This made a noise like pigeons taking off in the park. Germaine Greer sat there with a sublime smile on her face, as if to say: "How you do it, my boys!" 

Here's more evidence of the Versailles-like "let them eat cake" hypocrisy:


Screen shot from Met Gala video via shareable YouTube.

Notice the dark-skinned staff at the perimeter forced to wear masks while the celebs preened for the cameras with their politically correct messages, phonily claiming to stand for the little guy.  They mingled well and ate the food amid all that "defiance."

And it was weird stuff, given that so much of it was so...ugly.  Here's one slide show, here's another one, here's another, and here's another of the decadence billed as nowadays-beauty.  For an arts event at an art museum supposedly devoted to aesthetics, these characters seem to have forgotten the aesthetics part.  It's just look-at-me stuff now, hold the beauty.  A couple of the actual fashion models seemed to understand aesthetics — Kaia Gerber and Gigi Hadad.  A few were weird but acceptable (e.g., Lorde, Amy Fine Collins).  But most were butt-ugly.  Some were going for the homeless look, or the fat look — who the heck dressed the three beautiful recent champion athletes, who are nothingburgers to make look good? — in some of the ugliest, most unflattering gowns ever seen, making Simone Biles look tubbalard fat, Sunisa Lee look sickly and misshapen in a rotten greenish gold, and Naomi Osaka in a junkyard shambles of uncoordinated colors?  Many adopted the Marie Antoinette look of Versailles-like excess with huge hair and pouf gowns, and others adopted the "naked look" redolent of the decadent "Directory" era that followed the Taliban-like austerity of France's Reign of Terror.  The men had a lot of girly-man disasters among them — Pete Davidson showed up dressed like an old lady.  Some nobody trying to get publicity for herself had a horse's head poking out the bodice of her gown.  Kamala Harris's stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, now a fashion model, literally looked like a clown

Here's the éminence grise of the event, hostess Anna Wintour, the de facto boss at Vogue, and looking, in her case, like a witch in an envelope of rotting flowers:


Screen shot from AP video, posted on shareable YouTube.

Come here at your peril, my pretties.

According to at least one report, Wintour picked out the gowns for some of the attendees, making one wonder if she picked out Ocasio-Cortez's, given that Vogue has "styled" the socialist congresswoman for multiple magazine spreads in the past.

It all adds up to a wretched, decomposing establishment not even knowing how bad its excesses look, as COVID lockdowns continue, inflation surges, the price of bread goes up, the government coffers go bare based on overspending and foreign adventures, and the United States experiences a gargantuan defeat on the world stage.  France went to revolution on those grounds against a sorry, decadent elite.

It sure looks like the same staging going on here.  Thanks for the information, Sandy.

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