Hello and welcome back to Fashion Matters. Are you sick of hearing about the Met Gala yet? Three days after fashion’s biggest and apparently most controversial night of the year, the degree to which the event could be deemed a success is still being dissected.

At a purely top line level, it can’t be doubted: this year’s gala generated a record $42mn for the Met’s Costume Institute, up from $31mn last year, with tables costing $350,000 apiece and guests paying $100,000 per head. With general philanthropic support for many major arts institutions currently on the decline, the longtime Met Gala mastermind Dame Anna Wintour has produced so much money for the institute in recent years that it unveiled its new permanent home this month: the 11,500 square foot Condé M Nast gallery that once housed the museum gift shop and where the latest “Costume Art” exhibition was officially unveiled. 

The level of viral attention produced by the night also hit all time highs, though to what degree that is a good thing feels harder to measure. There has been a big backlash surrounding sponsors, and particularly around the honorary co-chairs of the night Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos; headlines have suggested that the duo gave $10mn for the honour. But anger online over the flow of billionaire tech dollars into high fashion — in what critics perceive as a form of image laundering at a time of growing income inequality, civil unrest and war — has proved intense. 

And so while Amazon, OpenAI, Snapchat and Meta all purchased tables for the gala this year, in the end the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan skipped the famous carpet all together — as did Jeff Bezos, of whom there is only one official photo taken the entire night. Instead, Sánchez Bezos faced the crowds alone, wearing a midnight blue and rigorously corseted Schiaparelli gown that had been inspired by Madame X, the famous 1884 portrait by John Singer Sargeant that hangs in the Met today (the dress code this year was “fashion is art”). 

As I wrote in my review of the night, it was a knowing choice: the painting caused a social scandal when it was unveiled for being overtly sexual and tasteless. And yet the dress itself felt rather underwhelming in practice, not least because two other celebrities arrived on the carpet Monday night in dresses inspired by the same portrait — Claire Foy in Erdem and Julianne Moore in Bottega Veneta. It felt like an oversight to have all three of these stars — including the most scrutinized woman of the night — in such similar variations on the same theme. 

And what about everyone else? For a full round-up of the winners and the losers of the carpet head to my review. But I particularly liked Gracie Abrams in Klimt-inspired Chanel, Teyana Taylor in a silvery fringe look by Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford, Emma Chamberlain in Mugler and Eileen Gu in Iris van Herpen. 

I enjoyed Katy Perry in Stella McCartney, Jordan Roth in Robert Wun, Alexa Chung in Dior and Rihanna in Margiela.

And I was underwhelmed by Madonna (despite her retinue of handmaidens and a giant sailing ship headpiece), Kylie Jenner (Mrs Doubtfire bodysuit vibes), Heidi Klum (don’t ask) and — as always — Blake Lively, who used a really terrible dress and carpet appearance to distract from news released at the exact same time that she had settled her long-running and acrimonious lawsuit against Justin Baldoni. On we go! 

Why LVMH is selling off some of its brands

My colleague Adrienne Klasa this week wrote that:

Within the past 18 months LVMH has sold Off-White, the luxury streetwear label founded by late designer Virgil Abloh, the Greater China business of travel retailer DFS and its 49 per cent stake in Stella McCartney. But as Adrienne also notes:

Suits and the City, 15 years on 

During my first stint working at the FT, from 2011-2015 in the New York office, one of my responsibilities was to edit the captions for the FT’s professional street style column Suits and the City. Shot by the photographer Sophie Elgort, it documented the working wardrobes of New Yorkers in the 2010s, at a time when most men in Midtown still wore a suit and the Girl Boss era was at its peak.

Fifteen years later, Sophie has done a wonderful feature for us this week, revisiting five of her original subjects and looking at their sartorial evolutions in terms of professional dress over the last 15 years. It has also made me think twice about my own attitude to dressing for the office, which definitely prioritises comfort over anything else — I don’t think I’ve worn a heel during the day except for a wedding since 2019!

And finally…

I was entertained last week when a message popped up on one of the local parenting WhatsApp groups I belong to. It came from a mum offering up the details of a highly sought after dealer. 

No, not that kind of a dealer, although his wares were international, rather decadent and he wanted to be paid by weight. This was my first introduction into the world of procuring top Alphonso mangos, which as the initiated among you will already know are reaching peak season.

Now I like mangos as much as the next person but I must confess I had no idea that these exclusive edible luxuries can have complex supply chains far beyond just going to your local store. A few days later, at my uncle’s 70th birthday, my cousin arrived proudly holding a small jewel-coloured cardboard box with six perfect specimens inside as a gift. She had pre-ordered them from her local Iranian supermarket with whom she had a longstanding and loyal relationship. They didn’t give this calibre of fruit to just anyone, she explained, and looked at me with pity when I confessed I had no prior knowledge of the Alphonso underworld. 

“Almost everyone has a dealer if you know what you are after, especially if you are from South Asia,” she said, explaining that some of her dearest friends have a mango man in multiple cities across the world to give them access to the best of the market. When a shipment comes in — the WhatsApps go out — and you had better be quick as they sell out fast. 

Extensive subsequent reporting (*text messaging*) assorted pals and colleagues have since confirmed that I’ve been sleeping on this vast and delicious consumer trend for an embarrassingly long time. Luckily, I’ve now put my first order in. See you next week!

News

1. ‘The Chanel Hunger Games’: shopping haul videos go luxury (FT)

2. Ebay weighs GameStop’s unsolicited $56bn offer (FT)

3. Why are so many beauty brands faking scandals? (BoF, requires subscription)

4. Is privacy the new luxury? (Vogue Business, requires subscription)

‌

‌

What to read in the FT

‘It’s crucial’: how AI is reshaping the fragrance industry From hyper-personalisation to cutting costs, artificial intelligence is getting a hold on your perfume cabinet What sunglasses tribe are you? Ibiza dreamer, Fitness bro, wannabe James Bond – there’s a frame for every persuasion The insane labour of the world’s best canapés HTSI’s food writer meets the people putting their everything into the most exquisite snacks Britain’s top furniture designers are made in Milan Tom Dixon’s control of his own brand makes him an outlier among London creatives

‌