The Met Gala wasn't shit compared to the 1995 Indiana Jones Adventure opening
Last night’s Met Gala was another triumph for sartorial adventurousness, offering the year’s rare opportunity to see the wealthy and beautiful liberated, for one night only, from the burlap smocks we force them to wear to maintain their humility. It certainly did not disappoint. Some dresses were very long, pants were creased outrageously, and everyone got to think about Elon Musk’s sex life. Even better, Piers Morgan squeezed another angry op-ed out of it.
But while these joys are palpable and enough to sustain whole minutes of listlessly clicking through slideshows at your desk, I posit this: The Met Gala was, and always will be, a drunken, sweatpantsed stumble through a CVS at 3 a.m. compared to the intellectualized glitz and conceptual glamour that was the 1995 opening of Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure. Don’t believe me? Fuck you. Or rather, allow me to illustrate.
It was a sunny, sexily synergistic March 3 when Disney invited a veritable who’s who and who’s available to come be the first to experience its newest theme park ride into the heart of 1935 India, promising them their customary celebrity indulgence of not having to wait in line with plebes. Like the Met Gala, the overarching theme was religion—for the Met, Catholicism; for Indiana Jones, the wrathful temple deity Mara—and the stars really took it and ran with it, along with offering their own idiosyncratic plays on the character’s own swashbuckling style. Truly, these were famous people wearing clothes in a way you could expound upon for the length of an article.
For example, here we see Brendan Fraser—coming off a blockbuster year of starring in both Airheads AND With Honors—insouciantly posing as though he doesn’t know, or care, how to use a bag. He could have just put that bag over his shoulder, of course, but it takes genuine, mid-’90s derring-do to just sort of suggestively drape it in the crook of your elbow and contort your spine, sexily suggesting that you might squash the sandwich you stashed in there for later. Can you say that anyone at the Met Gala took half as much risk without choking on the acrid, cat-piss burn of your lies?
The Nanny star Fran Drescher wears a funky, color-blocked sweater with bell sleeves compressed under tight denim skirt, all topped off by clunky rain boots for a look that symbolically captures the cultural forces defiantly asserting themselves beneath the denim-skirt-like oppression of British rule in India, and the metaphorical shit one must wade through to square your political sympathies with the pampered life of a celebrity. Fran Drescher holds her head in mock agony at the cognitive dissonance.
Her fellow performance artist Tony Danza holds aloft a state-of-the-art Sharp Viewcam camcorder to record the cameras recording him—for you see, now the observed has become the observer, and the roles we all must play in this grand pageant are ever in flux. What happened at the Met Gala again? Blake Lively wore a big fucking dress? Great.
Actress Ellen Barkin dresses simply, allowing the muted colors and clean lines of her outfit to be the canvas that spotlights her accessories—one smiling with the innocent optimism of youth, and one frowning, her spark prematurely snuffed out by the impending realities of the encroaching 21st century.
HELLO I AM ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND THIS IS ME WALKING INTO THE AMUSEMENT RIDE FOR FUN. COME TO PLANET HOLLYWOOD, WHERE YOU CAN EAT A HAMBURGER LIKE THE MOVIE STARS. I TOOK THESE CLOTHES HOME FROM THE SET OF TWINS AND THEY DID NOT STOP ME. OKAY THUMBS UP, GUYS!
There are like five separate photos of Full House star Jodie Sweetin in this gallery, all in this exact same pose, and it’s probably best not to dwell on why that is.