Anna Wintour’s culture-vulture race exploitation
Perhaps the racism of Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s Met Gala was too obvious to mention, so consider its purpose. This year’s chosen theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, was transparently political: commandeering black celebrities just the way the Democratic Party does.
Look beyond the couture outfits and outlandish costumes to see how this fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s annual spring exhibition revived racial segregation, using the museum’s traditional setting as a standard of approval — and control.
Wintour is an unapologetic political strategist. She dictated the Met Gala proceedings the same way that Representative Nancy Pelosi organized the shameless George Floyd kneeling ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in 2020. Wintour based her premise on the 2009 Monica L. Miller book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.
Culture-vulture Wintour exerts political power (tickets for the gala cost $75K per person, and tables for multiples started at $359,000, usually paid for by high-end fashion houses) to influence public perceptions of race, according to the academic-Marxist precepts of Barnard professor Miller. The jargon on display — “diaspora,” “hierarchies,” “matrix of identity, race, gender, class, sexuality and sometimes nation,” “dandyism uses clothing, gesture, irony and wit to transform [black] identities” — amounts to arch overstatement. But as used here, it’s not so different from Joe Biden’s crude command to the host and audience of a black radio program: “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!”
Celebrities being a chattel labor force, Wintour, as hegemon, tells even famous blacks how to present themselves, and the public is taught how to perceive them.
The Marxist takeover of fashion language, aided by a fawning media, is a major offense, but the dandyism gala also shamelessly appropriated black American culture. It was Motown records mogul Andre Harrell who coined the term “Ghetto Fabulous” in the Nineties to introduce the independence of hip-hop-influenced manners and fashion. Yet Miller erases Harrell’s contribution, and Wintour tortures his concept, directing the celebs to avoid street behavior and instead lend their endorsement to the industry’s overlords. Most of the highlighted gowns were not, in fact, by black designers. (Note: The Met’s promo video introduces the term “dandy” with a photograph of Oscar Wilde.)
ShowMe.com quoted Miller’s aim: “I’m really interested in thinking about clothing, dress and fashion as a tool, as a critique, and also as a creative mode of thinking about liberation.” Her redundancy allows Wintour to play dandy, “rethinking” authentic black invention, thus updating both racism and slavery.
The media have obscured this cultural transgression by regurgitating Miller’s con that “Black dandyism has empowered and shaped Black fashion, culture, community, and more, over the years.”
Even Town and Country got into the act, explaining that dandyism was “first imposed upon Black men in the 1700s when it was fashionable among white Europeans to have well-dressed Black servants.” (Critic Gregory Solman’s perfect retort suggested an Ebonics translation: “House slaves were dressed better than field slaves to show the masta had money!”)
Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, chimed, “The show will explore the Black dandy as both a concept and an identity signifier.” Met docents better get used to the slang “Superfine,” since art lingo has become as insufferable as the egotists appointed as the gala’s co-chairmen, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and LeBron James, a notorious list of Democratic Party supporters. The “Superfine” campaign stunt makes Wintour the Simon Legree of contemporary politics, summoning America’s Topsys to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She convinces them to dress in ways that have nothing to do with most people’s lives yet flatter white liberal fantasies (as when Halle Berry exposed her privates, and actress Lisa wore Rosa Parks’s likeness woven into her panties).
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Seeing black celebrities mount the Met’s blue-carpet stairs seemed almost antebellum, with Wintour’s fancy exploitation evoking the auction-of-African-slaves scene that opened D. W. Griffith’s controversial Birth of a Nation in 1915.
The attendee who made the biggest splash was Diana Ross, who wore a wide, feathered crown and a white gown with an 18-foot train carried by six men. But Ross, a matchless, old-school star, visited the gala after a 22-year absence. Her smile belied hard work and luck. She has stayed true to Motown’s legacy: Her dress was designed by her son Evan Ross and Nigerian designer Ugo Mozie. Ross maintained her own gaudy fashion sense as a personal priority.
None of the $30 million raised goes to the proverbial “underserved black and brown communities.” (That’s some twist on “systemic racism.”) After all, the Met Gala is not a charity. Gone are the days when Carl Van Vechten, an overreaching, condescending patron of the Harlem Renaissance, was considered an exploiter. Now American culture bows down to Anna Wintour’s despotism.