We have got used to the First Monday in May being the night of the "Oscars of fashion". This is the day when the Met Gala or "the Super Bowl of social fashion events," as the late André Leon Talley once called it, takes place.
The Covid pandemic forced organisers to postpone it and, last year, the event took place on a random Monday in September. But, yesterday night, the gala was finally back in its usual May slot.
The event is a great annual fundraising gala for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute and marks the opening of the institution's annual fashion exhibit. The gala also gives the chance to the prestigious guests invited to show us mere mortals their exclusive, grand and fantastical Haute Couture attires.
This year's event, "In America: An Anthology of Fashion", is the second portion of a two-part exhibition exploring fashion in the United States (the previous part was entitled "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion") and Vogue revealed last month the dress code for the night – "gilded glamour, white-tie".
In a feature published on Vogue's site that explored the importance of the Gilded Age (1870-1890) in New York, guests were invited to "Dust off Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth" and embody "the grandeur - and perhaps the dichotomy - of Gilded Age New York."
Last night, guests mainly interpreted this period defined by Vogue of "unprecedented prosperity, cultural change, and industrialization" through beaded, sequined, feathery, monumental and extravagant gowns.
Their attires were in most cases inspired by a quote from Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence that was mentioned in the feature published on Vogue: "Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams, and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a roomful of rivals."
Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour stuck as usual to Chanel, but most guests got their exclusive designs made by Gucci, Versace, Burberry and, above all, Thom Browne (the choice seemed apt considering that the designer often plays around with tuxedos and the garment was brought to America in the 1880s, but maybe some guests opted for him for his connections with the exhibition, curated by Andrew Bolton, who is also his partner).
It is only natural to wish to return to grand occasions and dream about Haute Couture and red carpets after the pandemic, but the main theme of the gala simply seemed appropriately inappropriate or bizarrely dichotomic for different reasons.
The outbreak of Coronavirus is more or less under control if we ignore the current endless lockdown in Shanghai, in line with China's strict zero-COVID strategy to stamp out infections (while Beijing is now tightening restrictions to contain the Omicron wave).
Yet there are other worrying issues on our minds: there's the war in Ukraine; millions of people have been displaced with the Russian invasion since the end of February and the conflict, ominous and scary, is threatening to expand to other areas. You may argue that this is somehow remote from New York life, but there are dark clouds looming also over New York and in particular over Condé Nast.
In 2018 four publications at Condé Nast - Ars Technica, Pitchfork, Wired and The New Yorker - unionized. Last month 350 Condé Nast staffers sent a letter to the publishing house announcing they were forming Condé Union and asking the company to recognize it.
As we all know, Condé Nast is one of the most powerful media companies around, it publishes indeed a wide range of titles, including Architectural Digest, Allure, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Teen Vogue and GQ, just to mention a few ones.
In a statement, Condé Nast Union wrote: "We work for one of the largest and most influential media companies in the country, but Condé Nast also has a long, well-documented history of exploitation, leveraging its prestige to overwork and underpay its employees."
What are the workers asking for? In a video posted on Twitter at the end of March, writers, editors, social-media managers, graphic artists, fashion assistants and researchers, mention they are fed up and burned out, underpaid and overworked. They are therefore asking for better pay, job security, salary floors and commitment to diversity.
It is not rare for publications like the ones produced by Condé Nast to think that people can be exploited at any time of the day and that they can keep on doing their work every day of the week without having any breaks, proper holidays or proper wages. Quite often these publications think you should be grateful to them as they are "allowing" you to work there and to achieve in this way "status" (I speak from experience, I did work for Condé Nast as a freelancer). But, as the Condé Nast Union states in a release entitled "The Met Gala's sparkle comes from our sweat" dated 2nd May, "Prestige doesn't pay the bills. Prestige doesn't pay the rent". And it is an absurd contradiction that, while for many of these workers there are no securities in their lives, they write, edit and produce articles, videos and images about celebrities, grand lifestyles and exclusive fashion, things they will never be able to afford.
The same workers who have been asking to acknowledge the union, work every year on reports and videos from the Met Gala. We get to see the red carpet and dream about it, but behind it, to make sure everything goes as it should, there are hundreds of invisible people who act like those puppeteers who, dressed in black robes and hidden by black veils over their faces, animate traditional Japanese puppets. For them there is usually no recognition or glamour.
On the Condé Nast Union Instagram account, workers posted a faux Vogue cover with the titles "Guilded Glamour" and "Met Gala 2022 – Workers' Longest Night".
The text accompanying the post explains how things work on gala night: "While the cameras are pointed at the red carpet, there are countless invisible hands making sure every moment goes off without a hitch. These are freelancers, assistants, and producers who work tirelessly starting months before events like the Met Gala but receive no spotlight or recognition for their work. It's the universal Condé experience on an even larger, more intense scale, proving that there would be no Condé Nast - or Met Gala - without us."
"Making the Met Gala takes hours of extra work from the entire Vogue magazine team, not to mention other employees throughout the company. Yet Condé believes that prestige is enough to cover the incredible amounts of unpaid labor. If we do a job, we deserve to get paid for it, even if it is something as incredible as the Met Gala."
"Events may end at a certain time, but that doesn't mean the work ends. With events like the Met Gala, the Oscars, the Grammys, and more, the all-night news coverage and viral video moments come from somewhere - the computers of hard-working writers, video editors, and social media managers who have to stay up until the early hours to bring you content. Burnout is endemic to Condé Nast, and events like these do nothing but make it worse."
Quite a few creative jobs, writing included, do not pay or pay very little, that's why people in this industry usually juggle two or three jobs (again, I speak from experience, I do the same). Exhaustion, frustation and depression are the demons you learn to live with when you decide to keep on writing even when that doesn't pay the bills and you take up another job that gives you some security. But your exhaustion, frustration and depression become larger demons when you think that members of the untouchable media elite in the highest positions at Condé Nast (think Anna Wintour) get extraordinary salaries and that a tiny fraction of them could help you paying some of your bills.
Over the last decades, many blue-collar workers chose not to be part of a union (or were simply not allowed to join a union by their employers who threatened them…), but things are changing and Condé Nast should understand it. In April workers at Amazon's JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island held a vote and decided to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union. Besides, at the moment there are higher unionization rates among students pursuing further education and white-collar workers, especially from the publishing and education fields.
A Condé Nast spokesman stated that the company plans to have "productive and thoughtful conversations" with staff in the coming weeks and let's hope that it happens soon. If it doesn't, Condé Nast will be out of fashion as labour "trends" are changing: in March, on the 111th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Model Alliance announced pro-labor legislation introduced by Senator Brad Hoylman and Assembly member Karines Reyes. The Fashion Workers Act hopes to provide a regulatory framework for management agencies that represent models and creative artists in New York, seeking to regulate wages, paying times and health and safety regulations.
For now the Condé Nast workers are continuing to campaign for their rights: on International Worker's Day members of the Condé Nast Union rallied with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon union members and others in New York's Washington Square Park. AOC turned up at September's Met Gala in a dress emblazoned with "Tax the Rich". Maybe yesterday somebody should have opted for a "Unionise" gown, it would have been worth it to see Anna Wintour's reaction to it.
But we have almost forgotten the dichotomy we mentioned earlier on in the Gilded Age theme. This was a time characterised by a booming economy, but also by brutal conditions for the workers.
In "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York" (1890), Jacob Riis documented through his pictures the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s (you wonder if Erykah Badu and Francesco Risso in Marni were the only ones at the Met Gala trying to channel this dichotomy and "the other half" in their attires...). Besides, during the Gilded Age there were some major, recurrent and violent strikes, including the Homestead Strike (1892) and the Pullman Strike (1894). So opting for the Gilded Age, maybe Vogue was telling us that, no matter what, the rich will always have a great time and "the other half" will just have to struggle throughout their lives. Food for thought.
Now, though, take a break from compulsively checking the various Instagram posts showing who wore it best at the Met Gala and sign the petition to support the Condé Nast workers here.
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