The Paradox of TikTok Sponsoring This Year’s Met Gala

Art & Culture Ethical Fashion

05.07.2024

The Garden of Time was this year’s theme in honor of the Costume Institute’s newly opened exhibition, which celebrates circularity by showcasing archival garments dating back 400 years. But TikTok’s sponsorship of the event sent mixed messages.

It likely comes as no surprise that last night saw the return of The Met Gala, the annual ball that helps fund the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Every year, on the first Monday in May, guests—who have in previous years included fashion designers Thom Browne and Karl Lagerfeld and celebrities such as Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny, and Chris Hemsworth—are instructed to dress in accordance with the theme of the museum’s corresponding exhibition, which typically opens to the public the day after the gala. Previous themes have included 2019’s “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” “Heavenly Bodies” in 2018, and in 2022 “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.”

In the hours leading up to and following the event, countless articles are published congratulating the most inventive interpretations of the theme, and social media feeds become saturated by videos of the most viral, extravagant looks. Much of the 2022 edition’s buzz was down to Kim Kardashian’s donning of the crystal embellished nude column dress worn by Marilyn Monroe to serenade President John F. Kennedy in 1962, which ignited a debate about the preservation and protection of historical artwork (if you consider fashion to be art).

These issues were likely top of mind for this year’s exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which explores the cyclical nature of fashion and is themed around the elements of earth, air and water. To honor it at last night’s gala, for instance, Tyla took to the green carpet in an hourglass-inspired dress made from sand and crystals, a nod to the theme’s focus on ephemerality, and Charli XCX wore a dress made from 50 upcycled T-shirts. The flowers on Janelle Monae’s gown were made from recycled bottle tops, Nicki Minaj’s bright floral dress was crafted using aluminum cans, and Stella McCartney’s cohort of Cara Delevigne, FKA Twigs, and Ed Sheeran dripped in carbon-neutral lab-grown diamonds. Celebrities such as Zendaya, Kendall Jenner, and Emma Chamberlain all wore archival looks.

Meanwhile, the exhibition, which opens today, is made up of 250 garments from the likes of Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, and Collina Strada—whose “meadowsweet” floral deadstock organza gown will be on display, designer Hilary Taymour revealed to Atmos—some of which date back 400 years and are too fragile to ever be worn again or even displayed on mannequins. Such is the case with Charles James’s “butterfly” ball gown, a pristine version of which will be displayed alongside the original to highlight the fragility of silk.

In contrast to fast fashion, the types of garments on last night’s green carpet and, indeed, in the exhibition, are couture, the very definition of which is slow fashion.

Likewise, Jonathan Anderson, honorary chair of the gala and creative director of Loewe, who made headlines with with his Spring/Summer 2023 menswear line featuring coats and shoes with grass growing out of them, will show a similar concept within the exhibition, the garment slowly dying until its conclusion in September—a supposed statement on circularity. But when Anderson’s fellow honorary co-chair is Shou Chew, the CEO of TikTok which is also sponsoring the event and has a hand in the acceleration of fast fashion (so much so that high street fast fashion is now being “threatened” by ultra-fast fashion companies Shein and Temu, which bring out around 10,000 new products a day to keep up with the pace of TikTok’s trend cycle), it feels like the Costume Institute is sending mixed messages. The Costume Institute declined to comment for this article.

A fast fashion garment is worn just seven times on average before it is thrown out and shipped off to overflowing junkyards in the Global South where local communities put their health on the line to process imported waste. “The textiles of today are not really ephemeral—even though they might feel like it to us in the Global North because we can consume what we want and chuck it away into a landfill or a donation point and it disappears [to] places like Chile or Ghana where this stuff ends up,” says Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd, associate professor of fashion and sustainability at Nottingham Trent School of Art & Design. “I’m sure these things don’t feel ephemeral at all [to the communities who are forced to live next to ever-growing landfills].”

The lifecycle of a garment is, in part, what the Met’s new exhibition explores—as does the Gala’s wider theme, which has been dubbed “The Garden of Time” after the J.G. Ballard short story, evoking a certain circularity which is top of mind for those seeking to disrupt the current linear model of consumption. In contrast to fast fashion, the types of garments on last night’s green carpet and, indeed, in the exhibition, are couture, the very definition of which is slow fashion: fine craftsmanship that takes thousands of hours to create.

Yet, the real-life impact of a fashion industry driven by platforms like TikTok and Instagram is polluting waterways and landscapes across Asia, Africa, and Latin America at an unprecedented rate. The cycles of fast fashion—which have gone from four traditional seasons to 52 micro-seasons with Shein producing 314,877 new styles annually—and our appetite for consuming new garments continues to speed up, while the physical lifespan of a garment has ballooned out because of synthetic fibers like polyester and nylon.

The real-life impact of a fashion industry driven by platforms like TikTok and Instagram is polluting waterways and landscapes across Asia, Africa, and Latin America at an unprecedented rate.

So, if the oldest garment in “Sleeping Beauties” is an embroidered bodice dating from 1610, what kinds of garments are likely to remain 400 years in the future? Because synthetics were invented less than a hundred years ago, Dr Twigger Holroyd says that “we don’t really know how long these things will last because we haven’t had enough time.” Collina Strada’s Taymour puts it more bluntly: “The kind of garments that will survive 400 years from now are going to be garments made of polyester and plastic.”

The most hopeful outcome is that our garments won’t leave any trace at all. Nature-derived textiles such as Bananatex, which is made from banana leaves and is used by both Taymour and Stella McCartney, algae-derived BioFoam, and leather substitutes Pinatex, Vegea and Mylo are rapidly gaining popularity across categories. But, as things stand, scaling biomaterials is a slow and expensive process, and in the meantime, many “faux” animal byproduct dupes available on the market are found to be riddled with microplastics and, in some cases—like in Shein’s—mixed with real fur.

Dr Twigger Holroyd, whose work focuses on reworking existing textiles, warns against propping up the development of planet-positive materials as a beacon of hope that the legacy of the garments we leave behind won’t be plastic waste. Such innovations risk becoming futile if we don’t also address the systems that are driving overconsumption as well as labor and environmental rights violations within the industry. “We tend to think about how we can make things differently without really coming to terms with the things we’ve made already,” she says.

The world is changing rapidly—and fast fashion is responsible for a lot of the more alarming impacts that will reverberate in decades and centuries to come. While the garments from centuries ago remain intact as symbols of immaculate craftsmanship, the same won’t necessarily be true in the future, especially if the likes of TikTok continue to hasten our cycles of consumption. Whether intentional or not, the Met Gala theme prompts us to consider, and take responsibility for, the attire that might still be circulating in 400 years—that is, if we’re around that long to see them.