The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced that its Costume Institute faces an existential threat if the annual Met Gala is altered. Curators warn that the preservation of historical garments is scientifically impossible without celebrities paying seventy-five thousand dollars to misunderstand a camp theme.
One is reminded of the structural fragility detailed in Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'; though perhaps a more apt comparison lies in Dante's 'Inferno', or, inexplicably, the second season of MTV's 'Jersey Shore'. It cannot be coincidence that the continued preservation of a 1947 Christian Dior bar suit now relies entirely upon the willingness of tech billionaires to wear ill-fitting velvet tuxedos while Anna Wintour looks on with terrifying stillness. The architectural integrity of the museum's subterranean textile archives, we are told, demands this annual ritual sacrifice of dignity on the Fifth Avenue steps.
The delicate silk fibers of our Renaissance tapestries draw their molecular stability directly from Jared Leto arriving holding a replica of his own severed head.
Without the gala's influx of capital, the institute faces the grim prospect of funding its preservation efforts through standard philanthropic endowments. Such a pedestrian fate, the museum insists, would unravel the very fabric of New York society, leaving the public to view historical fashion without the necessary context of a Kardashian struggling to breathe.