The buzz leading up to this year’s Met Gala, talking place Monday, May 5, has felt oddly quiet. To be fair, the news has been wild and the fashion industry is probably more focused on things like earnings reports and tariffs right now. But also, this year’s event hasn’t drawn the coverage-fueling backlash it often does.

Last year’s Sleeping Beauties theme, opening an exhibition showcasing the Costume Institute’s dresses that were so fragile and old they had to be displayed lying down in glass cases, stirred up the usual conversation about rich people being too rich and capitalism being bad. It didn’t help that the “Garden of Time” dress code was inspired by a JG Ballard short story in which the super-rich hide away in a gorgeous villa while the “unwashed” masses riot. The previous theme — Karl Lagerfeld — reminded people of how he left this earth an offensive old man. Prior to that, we had an American fashion exhibition with a gala dress code of “Gilded Glamour” — an homage to the Gilded Age — which was… odd. That was the tail-end of Covid, income inequality was a major theme in the news, and we were celebrating the age of railroad tycoons summering in ostentatious Newport palaces? Awkward!

This year’s exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style and gala (dress code: tailored for you), celebrating Black dandyism, have evaded this sort of controversy, as the first Costume Institute exhibition and Met Gala to explicitly celebrate Black fashion and Black creativity, which feels long overdue.

However, Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s son and President JFK’s grandson and Vogue political correspondent, went on Instagram last week to pick at the whole “let them eat cake” aspect of the event. “Hey Anna Wintour, I’m sorry, but I’m boycotting the Met Gala this year, I can’t go in good conscience with so much happening around the world and at home — it’s just not the time,” he said. He continued in another video, kneeling on a paddle board, “Instead I’ll be launching something brand new, something of my own, something important and informative.” Then he paddled away on whatever brown body of water he was in. (I fear the Hudson.) On Twitter, he called it a “PATHETIC EVENT FOR CORPORATE SLUTS.”

It was the spiciest rebuke of the Gala we’ve seen this year. Instagram commenters pointed out that cultural institutions need the money from fundraises like this now more than ever. And that this year’s theme is different because it celebrates Black influence in fashion. And that hey, how is raising money for a costume department at a museum a bad thing?

Schlossberg was probably trying to be funny and irreverent. This is the guy who, for the Vogue story announcing his gig as their political correspondent, was photographed lying on the floor on copies of his own face. His posts, though purposefully ridiculous, raised the interesting subject of the Met Gala’s clash of culture and capitalism, and when one outshines the other.