u/-chimchooree-

A reality-television heiress arrived in a custom Schiaparelli rubberized bodysuit with sculpted nipples, beneath a ballooning satin skirt embroidered with 10,000 baroque pearls and 7,000 hand-painted fish scales. The garment, by the house’s own admission, required 11,000 hours of embroidery, the equivalent of more than five years of a working woman’s full-time labor for a single evening’s wear. Her older sister appeared in a metallic-orange breastplate conceived by a British pop artist and finished in an actual auto body shop, featuring cone bras lifted from Jean Paul Gaultier.

A pop singer, born in Michigan and old enough to know better, mounted the steps in a Saint Laurent ensemble accompanied by women in sheer blindfolds, wearing a hat fitted with what observers compared to a ship’s mast, carrying a brass trumpet, and trailing a violet organza cape so vast that seven attendants were required to manage it. The fashion press, fully in sync with the aristocratic pretensions, called these women her “ladies-in-waiting.” The hostess herself, the billionaire’s wife who last year purchased an 11-minute trip to the edge of space aboard her husband’s vanity rocket, appeared in a Schiaparelli gown said to be inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Madame X.

Bad taste competed with brainlessness. An actress with a cage strapped to her backside. A singer immobilized inside a sculpture she could barely walk in. A Chanel gown that, Condé Nast’s own organs proudly reported, had absorbed 761 hours of atelier labor. The official theme was “Costume Art.” The actual theme was money, and the working principle of the evening was that there exists no quantity of human labor too great to be expended on the four-hour amusement of the rich.

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The Met Gala is a ritual whose purpose is to make the rule of the billionaires appear glamorous and somehow deserved. What the spectacle communicates, in the only language this class still speaks fluently, is contempt for the overwhelming mass of the city’s population.

As for the guillotine, we have referenced it only for satirical purposes. The question that opens this article, however, is a real one. The filthy rich can keep their empty heads, but not their money. Expropriation of the mega-millionaires and billionaires is a social necessity. The United States is controlled by an oligarchic ruling class that is as shameless as it is brutal. It has rendered itself intolerable by its own conduct. Society cannot afford the rich. The working class will have to separate them from their bank accounts.