Marketing Solutions for Highly Skilled Professionals

Motivation is a tricky and sometimes slippery concept to talk about. I like the way the Greeks explored it – externalizing the entire phenomenon onto the artistic muse. I deeply relate to the feeling that some metaphysical being is bestowing or withholding my inspiration and drive at their unintelligible whim. 

This last week when Met Gala photos started to hit fashion and celebrity sites, motivation, muse, and decadence aligned to create some controversy. As the IDF shelled Rafah, the planet experienced the hottest April in recorded history, details of the former president’s nasty encounter with a porn star were aired in court, and police brutalized groups of peacefully protesting college students, celebrities and designers gathered in Manhattan for a night of charitable extravagance in support of the iconic art museum.  

As photos of the event began to pop up on social media, the theme of this year’s gala, a short story titled “Garden of Time,” got a little more examination than the board had bargained for. Anna Wintour, fashion editor of Vogue and chief organizer of the annual event, was uncomfortable enough to make a public apology for what she called “confusion” surrounding the theme. 

The story is very short so it’s hard to say with absolute certainty the intent of the author, but it is clearly a story about conflict between social classes. A wealthy man wanders his lavish estate, watching a mob of angry working class people get closer and closer to his home. He spends his days and evenings admiring his trophy wife, looking at his property, strutting around in fancy clothes, and uses magical roses from his garden to delay the inevitable sacking of his estate. 

In the end, as the mob gleefully destroys everything remaining of the decrepit mansion, the invaders neither know nor care what happened to the estate owners. 

After he plucked the last of the time-pausing roses, the aristocrat and his wife turned to stone, the estate crumbled and fell, and briars grew around the stone elites and hid them. The hiding and protection of the statues could be read as romanticizing elitism but could also be stretched to mean that they were irrelevant to the aggressive and immediate needs of the impoverished.

During the body of the story, the themes were pretty clear – the male aristocrat and his beautiful wife are fully invested in pretending that time and the mob are not coming for them. They see the approaching crowd and they go on living their lives pretending nothing is happening until they pluck the last roses, use their magic, and then turn to stone just before the mob breaches the walls.

What makes the controversy over the theme so entertaining is that it appears the board either didn’t bother to read the story, or they completely misunderstood how it would be received by the public. In her apology, Anna Wintour shifted some of the blame onto Andrew Bolton, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute curator – “I said, ‘What are we going to say to people to wear to this night?’ And he said, ‘Well, what about ‘Garden of Time?” So I fear that we have unleashed a lot of confusion out there. And for which I deeply apologize, I imagine we’ll see a lot of flowers, a lot of flowers.”

Did Andrew Bolton deliberately set up a hilarious group self own for the nation’s biggest celebrities to beclown themselves with?

I fucking hope so.