SLEB Safari thoroughly enjoys the first Monday in May, you know, the Met Gala. The best outfits are bold and visionary and on-theme. We’ve seen enough slip dresses and column dresses to last us a lifetime. Save it for the Oscars puh-leeze.
This year’s theme was “gilded glamour, white tie” and not everyone’s outfit reflected the extravagance and excess of the gilded age but that’s par for the course.
Kim Kardashian had laser focus..
She wore the nude-effect dress Marilyn Monroe had worn to sing a breathy Happy Birthday Mr President to JFK. The 60-year-old dress is kept in climate controlled storage at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum but she was allowed to borrow it for the evening, or rather, for the length of time it took her to walk the red carpet.
Kim was helped into it by a white glove wearing conservationist in a changing room set up beside the start of the red carpet and when she reached the other end of the red carpet she changed out of the dress which was whisked away to climate controlled safety by security guards.
The dress was custom made for Marilyn who was sewn into it, naked apparently (which was a bit of a gamble if the stitching didn’t hold) and the silk had been hand dyed to match her skin tone. Better yet, the silk it is made from is now banned because it is highly flammable.
Should Kim Kardashian have been allowed to borrow it? Probably not. There was no real point to it considering she wore a replica for the rest of the night.
There are plenty of historians and conservationists who think it inappropriate that the dress was lent out for the evening, to anyone.
The former head of the Met’s Costume Institute, Sarah Scaturro, told the LA TIme she felt “frustrated” because “it sets back what is considered professional treatment for historic costume”.
As is often the case you don’t get one Kardashian/Jenner, you get the whole kit and kaboodle, and so it came to pass that all five sisters were at the Met Gala accompanied by their momager Kris.
To Sleb Safari’s untrained, yet highly opinionated, eye Kim and Khloe’s dresses weren’t worlds apart. And at least Khloe didn’t have to give hers back to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum. Trust Kim Kardashian to ‘shop’ in a museum display.
Tracee Ellis Ross loves fashion
HANDS down the cutest story today is told by Tracee Ellis Ross whose mum is Diana Ross. Unimaginable, right?
Tracee is uber stylish and likes to have fun with her clothes and was explaining that to Instyle magazine.
“I just really like clothes, okay? I’ve always been like this. I was the girl that was picking up the beads that came off of my mom’s dress onstage, and I would keep them in little film canisters just to look at them.”
Too cute.
Hugh Dancy pitches a great idea for two TV shows
HUGH Dancy, husband of Claire Danes and fellow actor, has a charming anecdote about the couple helping each other to learn lines.
He told The Times that when he was starring as an FBI agent in Hannibal and she was playing Carrie in Homeland they would rehearse scenes with the other person reading the different parts in the script.
“Somewhere in the ether is a world in which Claire played Hannibal and I played Saul Berenson,” Hugh says.
Sleb Safari would love to watch both those shows.
Tom Cruise goes full Tom Cruise for Top Gun: Maverick premiere
TOM Cruise is a man who likes to do that little bit extra to show you how committed he is to a person or a project. Sometimes that little bit extra involves bone fractures because he didn’t let the stunt man do the job he was hired to do. Other times it involves jumping up and down on Oprah’s sofa to emphasise how in love he is.
This time around Tom’s little bit extra saw him go full Tom Cruise by flying a helicopter to the premiere of Top Gun: Maverick, landing it and then strutting across the tarmac and on to the red carpet.
Tom Cruise just can’t help being Tom Cruise.
