As pro-Palestinian protests unfolded blocks away and Israel carried out airstrikes on Rafah, the Met Gala took place in New York on Monday evening devoid of political statement. Attenders wore dramatic dresses made of sand or tens of thousands of crystals, had teams of helpers lug heavy trains and wore suits akin to three-seater sofas. Yet any sartorial statement about what was happening beyond the red carpet was absent. The nearby chants of protesters did nothing to pierce the vacuum. It “felt really dystopian”, said Venetia La Manna, a campaigner for fair fashion who posted a video on Instagram this week in which she pointed out the absurdity: “As our favourite celebrities took to the red carpet and voluntarily lost the ability to breath and move, Israel seized control of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing, halting the flow of aid, leaving Palestinians nowhere safe to go. They are involuntarily losing the ability to breathe and move.” Previous Met Galas have not been so devoid of politics. In 2021, the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caused controversy by wearing a dress emblazoned with “Tax the Rich”. In 2018, to coincide with the “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” theme, the actor Lena Waithe wore a rainbow cape. The Gilded Glamour theme of 2022 – a reference to the opulent 19th-century gilded age – provoked several attenders to dress to make a statement, including Riz Ahmed, who used his outfit to draw attention to the role of immigrant workers “who kept the gilded age going”. “Fashion cannot turn its cheek,” says La Manna. “Fashion is inherently political. Clothing is political. Fabrics are political. It’s art, right? And art is inherently political. For an event that is so based around celebrating art, it just felt like a missed opportunity for not a single statement to have been made.” With thousands of cameras trained on them, and billions of people watching via social media, red carpets offer a chance to make statements. In 2018, actors wore black at the Golden Globes as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. Ditto at the Baftas the same year. When things had cooled in 2019, stars still wore “Time’s Up x 2” bracelets. At the Screen Actors Guild awards in 2022, actors including Michael Douglas and Greta Lee wore blue and yellow in support of Ukraine. Other recent high-profile red carpets have seen at least some political dressing relating to Gaza. Celebrities including Billie Eilish and Ramy Youssef wore Artists4Ceasefire pins at the Oscars, while others, including the Anatomy of a Fall stars Milo Machado-Graner and Swann Arlaud, wore buttons with the Palestinian flag. Even subtle symbols were almost entirely absent from the Met. La Manna would have liked even “a watermelon clutch”, the fruit bearing the same colours as the Palestinian flag. The reasons for the silence are complicated. “Is it because the people in attendance and the brands in attendance just take the stance that it’s not worth the outrage, it’s not worth the potential loss of money?” asks La Manna. It was not a surprise to the fashion industry activist Orsola de Castro that no one arrived in “an amazing column couture gown in the colours of the Palestinian flag”, but it did, she says, “consolidate this horrendous understanding that [there is] some kind of dystopian fear of speaking out over something which is so blatant”. La Manna speculates that high-profile people may have “checked out”, at least from public statements, having seen the “industry-wide outrage” unfold after even “an incredibly reasonable political statement, say Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech [about what he called the “dehumanisation” in Gaza] at the Oscars”. The role of the gala being to raise money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Amy Odell, a biographer of Anna Wintour, said “brands usually don’t really want to be around controversy and politics”. But in the social media age, a completely apolitical event feels out of touch. Instagram feeds ricochet between pictures of the Met Gala and Gaza and, increasingly, “people are not looking at [the Met] as a distinct thing that exists separately from everything else going on in the world”, says Odell. The theme of this year’s event even invited politics. While it was met with confusion, guests were tasked with paying homage to The Garden of Time, a title that takes its name from a 1962 short story by JG Ballard, a tale of crumbling hierarchies in which a count and countess are overrun by an angry mob. The cognitive dissonance between the pretty roses of celebrity outfits and the story’s plot was pointed out on social media, with one fashion writer, Rosalind Jana, calling it “deliciously ironic”. Wintour has willingly courted controversy in the past. Odell points out that when she chose to put Ivana Trump on the cover of Vogue in the 1980s, she “knew she was going to raise some eyebrows”. Ditto the interview with Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in 2011, as the Arab spring began. Odell says she does not know whether Wintour issued some sort of decree for no political statements, but that she is “involved in most of the outfits that come down the carpet … she has a lot of control”. Odell would not be surprised, for instance, if Wintour had known that Ocasio-Cortez was going to wear her “Tax the Rich” gown in 2021. Outsiders looking in are “desperate to see some kind of solidarity” from celebrities, says La Manna. For De Castro, not to do so via even a subtle symbol like a ribbon or pin shows “an absolute lack of bravery”.