Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures, because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently.
The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each its own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the opportunity to raise his and Sanchez’s status in the fashion world by giving money to it.
To cancel the Met Gala, however, would be unthinkable. Demand for it among rich New Yorkers and Hollywood celebrities is way too high to contemplate so rash a move. I therefore propose to turn it into an annual fundraiser for The Washington Post, which has no endowment.
Of all the ways to show off how rich you are, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced, in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption.” That extends well past the demonstration that you can afford to buy an expensive outfit. The manner of dress should also “make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” The elaborate Met Gala getups that women in particular display don’t stop at demonstrating that the wearer could never work in them. They also raise some questions about whether the wearer is too ethereal to go to the ladies’ room. The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis published a groundbreaking report on this question Monday, revealing that a class of assistants exists whose “path to rising up the fashion and celebrity ranks includes helping stars who are sewn into their own underpants onto and off of the toilet.”
A key to success would be to keep lowly Washington Post staffers away unless they were covering the event. They’ll just have to gratify their own status urges by attending the White House Correspondents Dinner, whose sartorial demands are more achievable. Anna Wintour could still run the gala if she wants, and perhaps the Met could be persuaded to host in exchange for a few free advertorials spotlighting travel-worthy exhibitions like its current Raphael blockbuster.
A simpler solution, of course, would be for Bezos to stop looking for frivolous charities to waste money on and focus on the philanthropic concern that suffers daily from his stinginess. Yes, the Post is an expensive charity, but Bezos lost one-third as much money this year to the Costume Institute, which didn’t need a cent. Also, give me a break, the man is worth $277 billion. If he peeled off $3 billion to create a Post endowment and then walked away, that would throw off more than enough each year to run the Post properly for the rest of his life. When he died Bezos could leave it more. He could still live like a pasha until then.
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