Big Tech wants a slice of the fashion world. But why?
From Amazon to Meta, Big Tech is snapping up Met Gala tables and Vogue covers, but why, asks Anna Moloney
The Met Gala and Big Tech
In the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hangs the Portrait of Madame X. The painting was made at the behest of a French banker in 1884 and depicts his wife, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a young American-Parisian socialite, dressed in a draped black satin gown with jewelled straps straight over her shoulders. However, the portrait is an amended version, forced to be repainted after the original, in which one of Madame’s straps hung seductively off the shoulder, was shunned as shockingly vulgar.
On Monday night at the Met Gala, this year shrouded in scandal over its sponsorship by Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, it was this portrait that Lauren Sanchez (Bezos’ wife and co-sponsor) chose to channel in her own look.
Intentional or otherwise, it’s a sly nod to what has been a controversial Met, which has offended parties both on matters of ethics (some celebrities reportedly boycotted the event on account of Amazon’s involvement while activists staged their own fashion show outside the event on Monday night) but also, perhaps more interestingly, taste. After all, how can Vogue, which for years has built its prestige as being the ultimate arbiter of taste, now be reduced to rolling out the red carpet for a man who made his fortune selling cheap mass market goods for next day delivery.
The answer, from the point of view of Anna Wintour and her struggling print machine, is not too hard to discern (and just so happens to be aptly explored in the just-released Devil Wears Prada 2), but there is a question for the other side: why is big tech so interested in getting involved with fashion?
After all, Bezos’s sponsorship is not an isolated case. This year’s Met Gala was dubbed by some as a ‘tech bro takeover’, with Meta, OpenAI and Snapchat all buying tables ($525,000 each, by the way) and Mark Zuckerberg himself (who also recently appeared front row at Prada’s Milan Fall/Winter show) attending the event with his wife Priscilla.
It seems that for all its excesses, big tech has figured out that taste and cultural cache are among those few gilded things it can’t devise an algorithm for, though Ms Sanchez, who stood proud next to Ms Wintour on her entry into this glittering world, showed she sure as hell is willing to pay for it. Fittingly, she wore her own straps down.
AI tastemakers
On the other side of the coin, some corners of fashion are willingly offloading their own taste to the guardianship of tech. Online style publication Sheerluxe, known for their social savvy team which has transformed their own workforce into influencers by filming in-office content such as ‘what’s on my desk’ and ‘a day in the life’, made headlines more than a year ago for creating an ‘AI editor’. After an initial backlash (and a team ‘duvet day’ to recover), the publication responded by driving full steam ahead. Since rebranded as ‘AI tastemakers’, Sheerluxe now runs four AI bot accounts managed by their own ‘Sheerluxelab’. If you look on the comments of any of them you will largely find the pleas of Sheerluxe readers telling them they don’t want lifestyle recommendations from non-living entities. But what do they know – the publication sold for almost £40m this year, bots presumably included.
Critics in pyjamas
Perhaps the real revelation of the Met Gala’s fight for cultural relevancy is that taste has now been democratised, and this is what is truly threatening to our illustrious tastemakers. No longer are we waiting for Vogue’s best dressed list, but instead logging on to Instagram or Tiktok to hear the verdict (or perhaps even contribute ourselves) from the hoardes of pyjama-clad critics at home doling out judgements on meticulously crafted gowns that no doubt took months to make, let alone years of expertise behind the designers.
Taste, after all, is no longer gatekept like it was once.Which means I can add my two pennies too. Personally, for me Emma Chamberlain, dressed in a handpainted Mugler gown inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night, stole the night, though I also adored Sabrina Carpenter’s custom Dior dress, crafted from actual film by JW Anderson.
The National is on a roll
The National Theatre has been on a bit of a streak for me this spring. I started the season strong with Les Liaisons Dangereuses (a fabulous French play full of sex and scandal and magnificently performed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner) and was then lucky enough to see Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia for its West End premiere (I can’t say enough good things about either). Last week, trying for the hattrick, I went to see Summerfolk, for which I got cheaper tickets for going to a British Sign Language adapted performance. For me, the play itself didn’t quite impress like the other two but I found myself unexpectedly dazzled by the BSL interpreters.
Both joined the play in costume, seamlessly blending in with the cast to sign for the 23(!) different characters. They didn’t seem to miss a beat and there were even a few cleverly added interactive moments between the signers and the cast that made them feel really part of the play – a sly roll of the eyes, or a comical look away during an excruciating declaration of love between one of the pairs. They added a whole extra layer of drama and expression, making it more than worth the discount.