That’s Kim Kardashian above, the perfect embodiment of empty celebrity. She was one of many “glitterati” who attended the 2023 Met Gala on May 1, and willingly participated in the theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” The whole event was billed as a tribute to the late fashion icon one of the all-time great designers, who was also indisputably a terrible person, at least according to the public pronouncements and signaled values of Hollywood’s, New York’s, cosmopolitan and the fashion world’s stars.

Piers Morgan, who, like a stopped clock, occasionally is spot-on accurate, was outraged by the event’s hypocrisy, writing,

Anyone stumbling into the Met by accident may have drawn the inevitable conclusion that the subject of all this obsequious fawning was some kind of hybrid non-binary fusion of Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela….In fact, [Lagerfeld] was one of the most ‘problematic’ people in fashion history…a racist, sexist, fattist, homophobic, abuse-tolerating, feminist-hating embodiment of everything this A-list crowd professes to most loathe. This was a guy who mocked #MeToo victims, ridiculed safety rules for protecting models on set, made Claudia Schiffer wear blackface in an afro wig, berated gay men who wanted to marry or adopt kids…branded Princess Diana ‘stupid’, said Kate Middleton’s sister Pippa’s face was so unsightly she should only show her back, and claimed Coco Chanel couldn’t have been a feminist because ‘she was never ugly enough for that.”

Morgan correctly points out what was so wrong and hypocritical about the event: it was not merely celebrating the designer’s art, but Lagerfeld himself. Bad people can be marvelous, brilliant artists, and though it sometimes is difficult, their art should be judged on its own merits and not be held hostage by societal revulsion of the artists themselves. Similarly, the fact that artists gives the world wonderful and lasting creations should not inoculate them fair assessments of their character or their conduct in other aspects of their lives.

“This wasn’t a tribute to his clothes, this was a tribute to the man,” Morgan fumes, “and the truth about Karl Lagerfeld is that was a nasty piece of work and if, say, Donald Trump had said half the things he did, the same people paying tribute to Lagerfeld would have been marching through the streets demanding he be cancelled.”

Morgan wasn’t the only commentator who noticed the hypocrisy; actress Jameela Jamil also expressed her disgust at the celebrities who attended the 2023 Met Gala for paying tribute to Lagerfeld. She wrote,

“Last night Hollywood and fashion said the quiet part out loud when a lot of famous feminists chose to celebrate at the highest level a man who was so publicly cruel to women, to fat people, to immigrants and to sexual assault survivors. And all the women’s publications, and spectators online, chose to gleefully ignore it.”

Yes, that’s because most of these people don’t have any sincere political or social beliefs themselves, and their ethical values begin and end with self-interest. Like so many corporations, they adopt positions to gain publicity and favor depending on where the winds of public opinion seem to be blowing. Surely you didn’t believe that all those actresses expressing horror at Harvey Weinstein’s use of his power as a producer to bed aspiring young actresses really didn’t know what was going on until he was exposed in the press, did you? Did you?

The elaborate fawning over this dead designer is just supplementary evidence of what we knew already.

I hope.

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Pointer: Other Bill