LIZ JONES: The most famous women in the world believe they have to be naked to get attention. Completely desperate, they are driven by fear.

It is considered the Oscar of the fashion world. The annual Met Ball red carpet takes place on the first Monday in May inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (although judging by the photos here, it should be renamed the Metropolitan Museum of A**e), organized by the global edition of American Vogue. editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour.

It is intended to be a showcase of creativity. Is meant demonstrate how the fashion industry is truly a great art form, which today completely includes different shapes, races, genders and ages. Its purpose is to raise funds, apparently from its $350,000 (£279,000) ticket sales for the table of ten, for the museum’s work (although I wonder if the biggest stars stop smoking) and, to that end, organize your guests. a different theme each year on which to base your outfits.

This time they were floral. What is it not to love and stay?

And yet, this year’s dresses, and the bodies shod in them, have managed in one fell swoop to set back the cause of responsible, women-friendly fashion by more than 100 years.

I am referring to the reaffirmation by powerful stars of the belief that a woman has to be naked to attract attention. That the kind of publicity that actresses, models and talented people need and desire can only be achieved through self-exposure of the most literal kind.

Despite the prices, the clothes worn by many of those who walked the red carpet on Monday night (all from the world’s most expensive couturiers) were not made to enhance, support, disguise, empower or enhance. They were mere locks, a smokescreen that proclaimed to the world the Olympic hours of those who wore them in the gym or their skills as a cosmetic surgeon. They didn’t show women at their most beautiful or creative, but rather how little they ate or how preternaturally young they were.

Here was Jennifer Lopez, wearing a silver Schiaparelli made of 2.5 million beads and nothing else. Her legs, buttocks and much more of her were almost completely exposed. The Met Ball was titled The Garden of Time, but it should have been The Garden Where Time Stood Still. At 54 years old, isn’t López at an age where she might want to take her foot off the pedal?

Singer Rita Ora, 33, was another offender. She was wearing a Marni tabard that exposed not only the side of her chest but also her side. all. One commenter noted that his outfit resembled the beaded curtain at the back of a dodgy cell phone repair shop. It covered almost nothing.

Spying model Emily Ratajkowski in a Versace spiderweb dress, with all of her breasts and buttocks clearly visible, made me change my opinion of her as a woman who has held her own against the male gaze. I always admired the 32-year-old for fighting back against male photographers who own and profit from images of her body and thought of her as a woman who actually has a brain (she wrote a well-received book, My Body, in 2022). . But now, instead, I can only think of her as a weak and moody victim, the sum of her only to the feminine parts of her.

Even worse for me was the young movie star Elle Fanning, 26, in a Balmain dress. I’m sorry to say that she reminded me of a piece of meat wrapped in plastic wrap: pink meat about to be consumed by the tyranny of youth, fame and notoriety. Everything was transparent, transparent, not even a peephole, but openly exposed.

These women have careers, fame, money and fans, so I wonder, scrolling through the parade of pubic bones, what makes them come out dressed like that? None of them seem happy or comfortable. (The only bright lights at night were from more modestly dressed women: Kylie, at bargain basement Diesel, and actress Ayo Edebiri, at Loewe.) Instead, in my opinion, these young stars looked the other way around: eyes dark, solemn. , unhappy, frozen by flashlights that would capture everything they had to offer and present it as online clickbait in a matter of minutes.

Donatella Versace, who ‘dressed’ Ratajkowksi, is a woman, remember, so let’s not have as a thesis that they are gay and male designers who treat us like plastic mannequins. These women also aren’t intimidated by aggressive stylists who need publicity to boost their careers.

So why, after the MeToo decade, after focusing on breaking the ceiling of equal pay in Hollywood, do the most powerful and beautiful women in the world want to so willingly and senselessly humiliate themselves?

True power, of course, is not giving in to fads or the pressure of social media, a truism seen by the host of this meat festival, Dame Anna Wintour, 74, who chose to wear a demure dress Jonathan Anderson coat from Loewe. You could imagine her rolling her eyes at all these easily influenced fools and flippants.

There were also many corsets on display, that old school method of female subjugation. Pop star Ariana Grande was tied up in virginal white ribbons, while singer Dua Lipa’s black lace dress was pure Victoria’s Secret, worn with matching stockings that barely covered half of her behind.

Others could barely move. I almost laughed when I saw pop star Cardi B attempting to pose for a photo of herself: she needed no less than five red carpet fluffs to arrange the pleats of her black lace dress around her. Model Gigi Hadid wore a Thom Browne dress with so many ruffles she could barely walk. Instead of these women going out for the night, loud and proud, strong and bold, they were tied up, like invalids in a nursing home. Crawling around like beached whales, though with no trace of blubber anywhere.

This particular silhouette is much more unattainable than that of the abandoned children of the nineties, who could be imitated simply without bringing food or water. No, this silhouette requires cash. As former beauty editor Ellen Atlanta points out in her new book, Pixel Flesh, people like Kardashian and Kendall Jenner (who on Monday night wore a ’90s Givenchy) are part of a digital culture that fuels a beauty industry. global £500 billion. Butt lift surgery causes one death for every 4,000 operations. Almost one million Botox injections are purchased in the UK each year. In my day, I flipped through Vogue once a month. Now? Girls click photoshopped photos thousands of times a day.

A minority of men also looked foolish, notably the billionaire Norwegian salmon fisherman Gustav Magnar Witzoe dressed, appropriately, in salmon-coloured chiffon. In comparison, how handsome and superior Jude Law was, in a classic tuxedo. But it was especially the women who seemed completely desperate.

And I think I know what motivates these women. And it is the ancestral fear: of not being seen, of growing old, of not being loved, of becoming irrelevant.

Where are the stars who will be brave enough to buck this trend? Fame and success, as evidenced Monday night, sadly no longer have to do with a woman’s job. It’s just about her body.