the met gala theme this year is a book. i read it so you don't have to.

hello everyone welcome back to my YouTube channel my name is Jack Edwards and it is the first Monday in May which means today is the me Gala which is basically Christmas for people who love fashion except instead of Santa we have Zenda and Rihanna and of course the best thing about the metgala is being able to judge very expensive outfits worn by very successful people we get to judge from the comfort of our bedrooms in the comfort of our worst outfits that we own like I'm in my full-on pajamas you know Pizza stained t-shirt chocolate on my shorts I'm like I wouldn't have woron that outfit I wouldn't be caught dead in that you know when really the outfit that I'm am wearing probably cost as much as one of those people's nails but the reason I wanted to make this video today is because this year's Met Gala theme is actually based on a book this one right here and so I read it so that you don't have to although I actually really think that you should I really really enjoyed this it's genuinely very very intense and moving I had Shivers all over my body whilst reading this and actually if you are interested in reading it I will link it down below because lit Hub are basically doing a month of short stories every day completely for free and yesterday they uploaded the garden of time which is the short story that the metgala is based on this year so I'll link that down below if you are interested but if you're not or you just want me to summarize it that's what I'm here for like I said the story is called The Garden of time this is a 1,200 page book but it's actually only seven of these pages and this is a short story by the author JG Ballard now before I get into explaining JG Ballard and the book and how I would interpret this into outfits and also how I'm interpreting it with an outfit that I'm going to be wearing I just wanted to clarify that there is a difference between the theme of The Exhibition at the Met and the Met Gala theme so the theme for the Met exhibition is sleeping Bey Reawakening fashion I saw some Tik toks of people being like yeah I imagine people turning up in like a sleeping bag kind of thing I would say don't expect that because actually that's just the theme of the exhibit but the theme of the Gara tonight is the garden of time and while these two things are linked they're not the same so the theme of the exhibition is Sleeping Beauty Reawakening fashion the Met website says approximately 250 garments and accessories spanning four centuries will be on view visually United by iconography related to nature which will serve as a metaphor for the fragility and ephemerality of fashion and a vehicle to examine the cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal the exhibition will Breathe new life into these storied objects through creative and immersive activations designed to convey the smells sounds textures and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body and this cyclical theme of rebirth and renewal will become important again when we refer to this story and I think that's why this story was chosen as the theme for the Gara so now onto this book JG Ballard was a really interesting writer he was an English novelist essayist satirist and short story writer and he was known for his quite provocative works that sort of test the relationship between human psychology and mass media he was concerned with the ways that the world was developing how modernization was happening what we were kind of leaning towards whether we were going to descend into chaos into entropy and his life was really interesting too he was born in November 1930 in Shanghai and actually he spent four years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war he was imprisoned alongside his family and he actually wrote a very autobiographical book called the Empire of the Sun and this was then adapted into a movie by St Spielberg in the 1980s his books have gone on to inspire songs by Madonna and Joy Division he's had a huge cultural impact all the way up to 2024 when his book is the theme of the metgala he became known for his science fiction his dystopias his speculative fiction and his kind of post-apocalyptic ideas apparently in one of his short stories he essentially predicted YouTube he also predicted cyber sex as a concept he wrote a story where people have sex with each other via the Internet he was writing about these things speculatively long before they ever became a reality in fact I feel like he would have loved Black Mirror famously he said he thought of himself as a kind of man standing beside the RO with a big sign that said Danger on it and he unfortunately died in 2009 I was doing some research and I actually found out that he originally wanted to be a painter but he kind of had self-awareness and he realized that he wasn't the most talented with a paintbrush he didn't necessarily have the ability to match his vision that he had for the pieces that he wanted to create and so the philosopher John Gray actually said that he kind of sees JG Ballard's fiction as a gallery of sorts of his ideas and I agree after reading some of his Fiction it's so vivid and visual and it feels very cinematic actually I can see why so many of his books have been turned into movies because the way that he writes them is so easy to adapt I would imagine because it's so clear what he means and he would also have a lot of imagery of like empty swimming pools abandoned casinos Etc so yeah John gry describes this as a kind of gallery of his ideas this idea is also captured in his collection titled the atrocity exhibit hopefully that's not what we're going to be calling the metgala after seeing the outfits the atrocity exhibit let's hope not let's hope it's more The Garden of time and not the at exhibit but who knows to give you a little taste of his work he has a novel called the drowned World which is about how climate change has made most of the Earth surface uninhabitable so he was definitely very climate conscious and that's something we'll get on to a little bit later on but he also wrote a book called crash and crash is about people with a car crash fetish he also wrote a short story called why I want to Ronald Reagan so that kind of gives you a little taster of his work and what he was doing in his career from the distinct nature of the literary fiction of JG Ballard arose the adjective ballardian defined as resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories especially distopian modernity Bleak man-made Landscapes and the psychological effects of technological social or environmental developments so you can kind of see his impact on the culture at large and I think that's why it's really exciting that he's being celebrated by the me and Ballard kind of said that he saw society as a stage set it's something that we love and we enjoy and we appreciate but it can all be taken away so so quickly and I think that's also a great irony there with the kind of artifice of what the me Gala is so I think it's such an interesting choice to choose JG balard and specifically The Garden of time which we'll talk about now the garden of time was written in 1962 and we follow a man called count Axel and his wife who live in This Magnificent Villa they're surrounded by all the relics of their lives this life that they've created for themselves they listen to Mozart they have loads of beautiful Furniture ornate vases incredible paintings they collect rare books and ostensively it all seems very peaceful however all around the Villa as far as the eye can see there is just nothing except on the horizon is this approaching mob this angry Army who are getting closer and closer to the house however count Axel and his wife have this really beautiful garden full of these extraordinary flowers and they are th flowers they kind of have these glassy Crystal stems and each time they chop one of those th flowers the Army Retreats so they essentially buy themselves time and so each time they chop a plant and remove one of those time flowers from its stem the Army Retreat back and then they start their approach again from scratch however we get to a point in the story where we find out that the garden of time is no longer yielding fresh flowers the flowers are no longer blooming and so they now have a finite number of flowers left at their disposal which means they only have a finite amount of time and as time goes on they start to cut them back one by one and we're running out of flowers and so there kind of becomes this inevitability that the end is near and that the Army will eventually overtake the Villa overwhelm The Villa and Destroy them eventually they're reduced to cutting back the last flowers to temporarily fend off the mob but they no longer have any flowers left count Axel and his wife carefully put away all the relics of their life they put their books back on the shelves they put away their music and they take the last time flower it's actually really sad like I felt really gutted about this the approaching Rebel Retreat for the last time and then begin to approach The Villa and at this point there's nothing they can do when the Army do eventually arrive they come and they ransack the house they find two statues that kind of loosely resemble a husband and a wife and the husband and wife have essentially turned to stone and are destroyed and it's very very haunting tension is built so perfectly it's such a succinct and concise but very impactful story and I think it's really a metaphor for the evolution of human history in this cycle of creation and destruction that we have created one interesting article points out how in the garden of time we can see the micans burning Troy The Barbarians sacking Rome the Nazis murdering millions of Innocents and destroying European civilizations we can also see some of today's extremists killing people as a way to demand that Democratic societies tolerate their intolerance and other of today's extremists attempting to destroy science I also think that we could think about a kind of colonial interpretation of this in the way that indigenous communities exist in peace they've created a whole community and then they are overtaken and destroyed and reclaimed by outside sources it's so interesting how there are so many different scenarios you can kind of apply this metaphor to the way that humans create and Destroy in a constant cycle but I do also think that ballad was concerned with the climate crisis like I mentioned before and I do think that's a really crucial interpretation here I wonder if the nature imagery is sort of supposed to lead us to this idea of the natural world and the way that we are destroying the world around us what I find most interesting I suppose is this idea of impending doom this moment where we realize the end is inevitable and there's nothing more we can really do we can maybe withhold temporarily we can maybe push some things back but there is this inevitability that the Army is approaching that the climate crisis eventually will reach a point where we can no longer do anything about it and we will be destroyed so that's very depressing I do think he's saying we are running out of flowers like that husband and wife that's us we're we're the society who have run out of flowers we're running out of chances to prolong things it's pretty bleak I think I loved this interpretation that I read as well but we can also see in bad's threatening mass of humanity the popular culture of today the mobs who clog museums and historic places with their selfie sticks who exchange tips on any number of online sites about which remote and lonely place to ruin next with their garbage and their chatter and and their pointless presence perhaps Bard's writing was his way of escaping a world overrun by humans and it does feel so deeply tense so how could this be interpreted into outfits firstly we have a very literal interpretation we could take the flowers the garden the time iconography so firstly think florals I think we're going to have a lot of floral motifs and imagery florals for spring groundbreaking I also think that some people may think about the glassy quality of the flowers cuz that is mentioned a lot of times how kind of glossy these flowers are so I do think we could see some iridescent kind of looks that are quite elevated and luxurious so I feel like a lot of people might think that's not on theme when actually it is and that's why I'm here that's why I'm making a video but alternatively we could have some references to time and the motif of time like the Taylor Swift watch neck that she wore to the Grammys I imagine a dress of like upcycled watches could be really really cool maybe they could be recycled which brings me on to my next point of the second idea that I would kind of have which would be based on the act of creation and destruction so repurposing things this could be archival pieces from previous collections that designers maybe thought would never be worn again would never be seen in public again bringing them back from the archives would be really really exciting and kind of goes against that idea of fashion that things can only be worn once and that they should only be seen one time like on a catwalk or on One Celebrity at one event I like this this idea of people re-wearing something that already exists creation and destruction could also be represented in Old garments being reimagined and you know taken apart and then recreated again into something new and finally it could be garments made from other products so you know things that have been recycled or upcycled or refreshed and then the final thing I think people may work with is the dystopian idea you know the science fiction Vibe of JG Ballard's writing that could also be present in people's outfits so there's quite a lot to work with here I think but I'm sure a lot of the men will just turn up in a plain black suit don't stress me out don't make me mad it's always a possibility though don't don't rule it out now little plot twist at the end of this video is that I've actually been invited to the met this evening with Tik Tok I'm not doing the main red carpet thank God cuz I think I would have a panic attack but I am spending the evening with Tik Tok going to some After parties and stuff it's going to be so crazy exciting and I do have an outfit that is on theme before you come for me the outfit is on theme so I wanted to explain it it's actually not here yet it's currently midday and I don't have the outfit yet and I need to leave here at 4:00 so it's on its way to me but I'm just going to tell you about it this has been a little bit of a last minute project but I'm working with this incredible designer called Jackson Wyatt who is working his absolute ass off to make this happen for me and he's currently just doing the final bit of hemming on the train spoiler alert there is a train but yeah basically the outfit is a dress that he's taken from his archive and repurposed into a shirt for me so he sliced off the skirt of the dress and just Ed the top part to create a top for me to wear and then parts of the skirt have been repurposed onto the shoulders as a kind of train that hangs down behind me so I really love that idea of creation and destruction like destroying a garment and then recreating it into something new and then I have these silky black trousers and what I really like is that we kind of have this metaphorical meaning of creation and destruction but we also have quite a literal one because I really think the outfit represents that moment when the husband and wife are turning to Stone I feel like the solid black of the trousers is the part that's already become stone and then my top half is still transforming it's still transcending so I feel like it's that moment of complete inevitability where we're starting to turn to Stone my bottom half is Stone and my top half is still kind of has this fluid nature because the material is very flowy it kind of looks like it's becoming something I think it's really cool so the outfit kind of looks a bit in flux like it's between two states and it is becoming Stone I don't know I thought it was so cool and I think that's a really crucial moment in the story of like accepting your fate understanding this is inevitable now and yeah I think it's going to be a moment for sure so you have to follow me on Tik Tok and Instagram to see the outfit when it arrives I think it's on its way right now but that's the kind of idea that we tried to capture in the outfit so this has been my summary of The Garden of time I hope that this helps you to judge outfits with some context and kind of know what you're looking for when people turn up on the red carpet if any of you put me on your worst dress list I will cry but fingers crossed I'll do you proud and I'm just so grateful that you guys have made this possible for me and that Tik Tok is has invited me the Jackson Wyatt is dressing me I just feel like the luckiest boy in the whole world so thanks for watching this video all the best stay in touch and I'll see you very very soon bye-bye

Channel: Jack Edwards

Views: 160,992

Keywords: met gala, garden of time, theme explained, theme, met, best dressed, worst dressed, booktube, book reviews, jack edwards, booktubers, booktok, classic books, historical fiction, short stories, classic fiction, political fiction

Id: yeY-jIVCd1U

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024