While most people love to gawk and fawn over the celebrities at the Met Gala, the themes are always up for debate. Sometimes it’s about people dressing off-theme, and sometimes it’s about people falling down the stairs. No matter what, the Met Gala always does one thing: make people angry. And that’s why community is all about!
But this year, the theme was based on the controversial designer Karl Lagerfeld, and not everyone was thrilled. Lagerfeld was a German designer who worked with Chanel for many years before his death in 2019. Though he was regarded as an iconic designer, he was also a controversial figure in the fashion world. Some of his well-known controversies include publicly opposing the Me Too movement and critiquing plus-sized models.
While many Hollywood icons happily walked the carpet on Monday, Jameela Jamil slammed her fellow celebrities and the online publications for giving Lagerfeld attention. She posted on Instagram: “Last night Hollywood and fashion said the quiet part out loud when a lot of famous feminists chose to celebrate at the highest level a man who was so publicly cruel to women, to fat people, to immigrants, and to sexual assault survivors. And all the women’s publications, and spectators online, chose to gleefully ignore it,” the She-Hulk actress stated.
The actress continued in the caption: “This isn’t about cancel culture. It’s not even about Karl. It’s about showing how selective cancel culture is within liberal politics, in the most blatant way so far. It’s about showing why people don’t trust liberals. Because of slippery tactics and double standards like this. And it’s not just Hollywood here, the general public online participated and were entirely complicit in the erasure of the truth last night. They replaced their pitchforks with spoons last night, to lap that sh*t right up…”
Jamil isn’t the only person to boycott the event. The Model Alliance also slammed Vogue for choosing the theme when Lagerfeld made many controversial/sexist statements in his life. Still, fashion’s biggest night went on as planned, though there were more cats out there than people had expected. Maybe one of these days they will pick a nice normal theme, like “Pajama Day” or something we can all relate to. At least the cockroach had a good time.