On Thursday, Vogue announced the co-chairs of the 2024 Met Gala, a characteristically strange mix of style-forward and normie celebrities. The group — Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Chris Hemsworth — is haphazard enough, but even more confusing is the mode by which Vogue chose to announce this cohort: a fake group chat.
The gimmick, which was first posted to the magazine’s Instagram account, goes like this: Anna Wintour sends a “Hello” out into the empty white yaw of a just-created group, asking some unidentified recipients if they are free on Monday, May 6. (Credit where credit is due: I have no doubt Anna Wintour does text like this.) The replies come flooding in — surprise, they’re all free — and the gang starts talking themes, briefly debating their conflicting definitions of what “the Garden of Time” means.
It is hard to say exactly what is so embarrassing about this clip, beyond that all the texts except Wintour’s are formatted as if they’re coming from the phone we’re looking at, which makes no sense. Mainly, it’s a cloying way of pretending rich, important people are just like us. It would be much more fun if Vogue showed us the real-life flurry of passive-aggressive publicist emails that brought this random mix of famouses together, or all the texts Anna Wintour sent the day Anne Hathaway walked out of a Vanity Fair photo shoot. I would also accept the full Slack channel about this photo shoot. A girl can dream!
