Earlier this week Vogue announced the theme for the 2024 Met Gala as “The Garden of Time” to coincide with The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” Spring 2024 exhibition. This all seems par for the fashionable and philanthropic course until you get to the inspiration for the theme: a short story of the same name by J. G. Ballard.
Vogue makes sure to mention that Ballard “is perhaps most known for his novel The Empire of the Sun, which was adapted into film by Steven Spielberg.” Which, ok, sure. But I had to chuckle because J. G. Ballard is well known to science fiction fans as the British author who also wrote the novels Crash, about a group of car-crash fetishists, and High-Rise, about an apartment building descending into chaos that opens with one of its residents eating his dog. Never mind all that, though, because Vogue offers the following advice when planning what to wear for the event:
Boiled down, the dress code, as well as the exhibition, is about fleeting beauty. The most obvious interpretation would be to embrace the “garden” part of “The Garden of Time.” Think melancholic florals (as moody florals aren’t moody enough).
Obvious, indeed. Personally, I’m intrigued to see how this year’s event co-chairs–Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, and Zendaya–interpret the theme. Of course, it’s easy enough to stay within the confines of the fractured fairy tale of Ballard’s story, originally published in the 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction above. But I’m much more excited about who might take inspiration from the rest of Ballard’s more outré oeuvre. Who among them will be brave enough to reference the Cronenberg film based on Crash, for instance?
As the director freely admits, Cronenberg assumes the role of Vaughan [in Crash] for his audience: “’Things you normally look away from actually reveal a kind of beauty—a different aesthetic—and I’m going to convey that to you in as seductive a way as possible.’”
Body Work, by Andrew Hultkrans
Zendaya is clearly working on the assignment already, having worn a Thierry Mugler cyborg suit from the designer’s 2005 couture collection to a recent Dune: Part 2 premiere. I’m curious to find out if others will do their homework or if they’ll miss the mark as so many did in 2019 with the Camp: Notes on Fashion theme. (Side note: wow, it’s a bit unsettling to look back at that Met Gala since it happened not long before everything shut down for COVID-19.)
Still, there’s plenty of inspiration to be had in Ballard’s early short story, which you can read here. The first thought that jumped to my mind was the arsenic dresses and wallpaper of the 19th century, so called because of the Scheele’s Green pigment that contained the toxic element. Shadows from the Walls of Death, the book of arsenic wallpaper samples from 1874, even sounds like it could be the title of a Ballard story. I would love to see someone in a Charles Worth style ballgown made with fabric printed with futuristic imagery or other modern touches.
This whole thing is an English Literature dissertation waiting to happen as there’s certainly much more that can and will be said about the Ballardian influence, fashion, and culture once the Met Gala happens on May 6.
Further Reading:
Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard’s Novels
How J.G. Ballard’s Science Fiction Tells the Future of Our Privatized Cities
Bitten By Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home
How a Library Handles a Rare and Deadly Book of Wallpaper Samples
Literary Devices 