It’s a dress so expensive, none of the previous owners could wear it and even Kardashian had to remove it once she got to the top of the stairs and get into a replica, one might even say gilded, version.īut that was sort of it. Kim Kardashian paid a sort of fitting tribute, wearing the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang “happy birthday Mr President” to John F Kennedy Jr, which was auctioned in 2016 for $4.8m.
Riz Ahmed was the one attendee to notably acknowledge the wealth disparities of the Gilded Age era, telling the press that his outfit was “a love letter to those blue-collar workers, those immigrant workers” who kept the country running during the period.
The Met Gala theme presented an opportunity for guests to emulate Twain’s commentary, or bring it up to date for today, yet the opportunity was almost unanimously bypassed. The title was a nod to the thin gilding that Twain said made the era seem more golden than it was. Twain’s novel was a satire of the greed and corruption that pervaded a time when some Americans successfully pursued the American dream to become very rich very quickly, while others lived in poverty. It was Mark Twain who coined the term The Gilded Age in his 1873 work The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
