Call it a return to IRL (In Real Life). New Yorkers are experiencing a bracing resumption of the physical experience of living in the city, four years after the onset of the pandemic upended routines, pushed people online and left much of the population, as in so many places, wondering if normality would ever return.
Uptown, police have broken up student protests on the Columbia and City University campuses condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza. Downtown, a furious Donald Trump is commandeering attention from the courthouse on the edge of Chinatown, snarling up traffic as his motorcade travels to and fro. President Biden’s fundraising trips to the city to fund his re-election are having a similar effect.
And on Monday, the annual Met Gala will shut down streets on the Upper East Side for an entirely different kind of event.
In an echo of the campus protests, there will be a heavy police presence, but the shouting will be of a different tenor as fans line the streets and cheer the arrival of celebrity gala-goers – among them, perhaps, Taylor Swift. From keffiyehs and riot gear to a fashion dress-up circus – the transition could be jarring. But the red carpet is once again resuming its role as the place where movie projects are promoted, celebrities shape their careers, and luxury brands boost their profiles – all under the eye of US Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour.
Met Gala observers are predicting a less contentious outing after last year’s tribute to the late and deliberately controversial designer Karl Lagerfeld, who was sometimes accused of misogyny and fatphobia.
“That was the most controversial I can remember,” say Wintour’s biographer, Amy Odell.
“Before that they had Gilded Glamour, which was tone-deaf coming out the pandemic – with Kim Kardashian wearing a Marilyn Monroe dress, and maybe damaging it, that seemed to fly in the face of everything the Met Gala raises money for, which is to preserve historic fashion.”
Last week, Conde Nast parent company of Met Gala organiser, Vogue, indicated that its legacy print products would increasingly be accessorised, among other film and streaming avenues, to become an events business focusing on social video streams from parties, including the Met Gala, Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party, Vogue World, which held its inaugural party in London last September, and the launch of GQ Sports, timed for the Super Bowl.
To illustrate the appeal of as-it-happens events, Wintour bizarrely drew attention to an unexpected guest – a cockroach – that briefly became a red carpet social media star during the livestream of last year’s party.
Not for nothing is the Met Gala called the Super Bowl of fashion. For Monday’s livestream, Vogue has charged $1m for two six-second advertising spots, according to a report by Business of Fashion.
There was also an ironic counterpoint to the company’s shift to live events when Condé Nast employees concerned by 94 planned job losses at the company took their protest to the streets too – specifically to the street outside Wintour’s home in Greenwich Village.
There are further signs of a rejection of remote living in favour of the physical. Online dating apps have seen their stock prices crater after losing favour with members of generation Z, who prefer meeting IRL. And last week, as if to put further pressure on the sector, the FBI warned of supposedly “free” online verification services by which fraudsters targeted users of dating websites.
Apple’s financial results last week were perhaps indicative too: they showed the steepest quarterly decline in iPhone sales since the pandemic began. (But even as it stumbles slightly, Apple remains one of the world’s most prosperous companies.)
This emerging return to the physical world might also be found in the fact that Wintour’s former colleague Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, is opening a magazine shop in New York’s West Village, with plans for branches in London and Milan as well. Carter, who edits the weekly digital publication Air Mail, has said he may produce the magazine in physical form later this year.
“There is something about the fact of colour pictures being on actual pages, and the opportunity for all the scent samples, that made magazines like Vogue not only something you read but also smelled. You still can’t do that on the internet,” says Robert Thompson, a media professor at Syracuse University.
“Like vinyl record or Blu-ray collectors, there are still people who want physical media to put on a shelf, to demonstrate their good taste.”
But between the political protests, the former presidents on trial, and the highly choreographed fashion events, New Yorkers seem to be rediscovering that, like the view of the city skyline, there is no substitute for real life. “This is New York 2024,” noted one longtime resident on Friday. “Bring your own straitjacket.”
