The Met Gala: Fashion's big costume party

It’s Met Ball week! On the first Monday in May the great and good of fashion come together for what is essentially an enormous, obsessively documented themed costume party. The event is meant to celebrate the opening of the Metropolitan Museum Of Art’s latest fashion exhibition, but, based on Instagram alone you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was merely a stage for Rihanna to make every other female celebrity and their stylist feel insecure and insignificant.

The past few years have seen various Amazon-costume-section-esque looks. The Manus X Machina theme led to a fair share of robots and tin men. This year’s theme was Heavenly Bodies: Fashion And The Catholic Imagination, aka a chance for Kardashians and supermodels to dress as sexy nuns. Who knew that a good old tarts and vicars party would be the fashion event of the year?

It’s apt that Rihanna went as the grand high master himself, the Pope. She left it to the lesser celebrities to go as his messengers and minions – bishops, preachers, that kind of thing. The Pope is the Catholic’s church boss and Rihanna is the fashion world’s queen, so it was all very apt. Her mitre and robes were made by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, who riffed on a pious look he showed as part of his Dior AW 2000 couture show. Fashion moves in 20-year cycles – the Seventies came back in the Nineties, the Nineties came back just recently – so it’s appropriate that Galliano rehashed such an opulent, spangled, theatrical look right as fashion is beginning to embrace that mood again.

On viewing Rihanna, Twitter exploded. Some decided that the Pope was no longer the most holy. “Breaking: It’s being reported that the Pope is stepping down from his role to make way for Rihanna. ‘She’s just TOO iconic, he said,’” joked one tweeter. It’d argue the two are pretty much neck and neck in competition. “The Pope wears Prada,” said curator Andrew Bolton, when introducing the exhibition ahead of the ball.

He was riffing on an article by Newsweek that painted the Pope as quite the style diva; “Pope Benedict XVI is nothing short of a religious-fashion icon, riding in the Popemobile with red Prada loafers under his cassock and Gucci shades. But his penchant for designer wear and a move to ditch the papal tailors who have dressed popes for more than two hundred years are causing new wrinkles in the Vatican.”

The pope? A style icon? I hear you ask. Well yes. The exhibition is testimony to this. Alongside the sparkling Catholicism-inspired garments by designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Thom Browne and Alexander McQueen are around 40 ecclesiastical pieces lent by the Vatican, dating back to the garb of Pope Benedict 14th, who reigned in the 1600s. On show are ornate, bejewelled vestments, tiaras and loafers. Sounds like quick trip round the Gucci store on Bond Street.

Highlights for me included the Tiara of Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878; “Weighing almost three pounds, the magnificent tiara includes about 19,000 precious stones, the majority of which are estimated to be diamonds,” read the caption. Snazzy. I was also taken with the keys of Saint Peter, which are given to each pope. There were two and they were enormous. “The gold one signifies his power to open the doors of heaven,” says the wall text. Casual. Beat that Rihanna.

Those looking for evidence that the Pope has more modern swag will be interested in news that he is currently auctioning off a Lamborghini Huracan that was gifted to him last November. Sotheby’s estimate it will go for between $300,000 and $450,000. He’s was also once given a Ferrari Enzo.

His Eminence Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, was also on hand to introduce the exhibition to press the morning of the ball. He looked pretty fly himself in his robes. “The church is all about truth, goodness and beauty,” he said, as Anna Wintour smiled on. “We’re into things like poetry, art and yes, even fashion.” Somewhere not far away in New York, Rihanna was prepping her mini-dress-cum-vestments and polishing her Louboutins. Somewhere else, in Rome, the Pope was probably lounging in something equally opulent. “Thank god for the gift of beauty,” continued Dolan. Amen to that.

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