Featured Image Credit: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic
Topics: Met Gala, Fashion, Billie Eilish
Thomas Bamford
Every year, millions of people watch the Met Gala red carpet to check out some of the most glamours outfits the world has to offer, but let's be honest, we love the insane ones, too.
And to be honest, it's way more fun to check out the more weird and wonderful outfits on display. Especially the ones that don't quite pull it off.
Does that make it the world's most expensive hate watch? Probably.
While millions tune in to either gasp or laugh, it turns out one of fashion's biggest nights, by multiple accounts, is not all it's cracked up to be.
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From the five celebrities below, the Met Gala can be a bit of an ordeal, full of people standing around in extraordinarily expensive clothes feeling embarrassed, and desperately wishing they were anywhere else.
Billie Eilish co-chaired the 2021 Met Gala, calling it 'amazing' and 'beautiful in there' on the night, then went on Howard Stern two months later and said what she really thought.
"The main thing that night made me think of felt was how famous people are literally nobodies," she said.
"Just randos, and it's so weird. I was like 'wow all these people are just somebody that's in class with you,' and you think this person's kinda annoying, you really like this person, and everybody's just, like, embarrassed and insecure about what they're doing and saying."
In fairness to Eilish, she didn't say she hated it. She just said it was full of awkward, insecure people pretending otherwise. Which, honestly, sounds about right.
One Direction star Zayn Malik attended the Met Gala in 2016 alongside his then girlfriend Gigi Hadid, dressed in custom Armani.
He later revealed he attended as his favourite Mortal Combat character Jax, and was "taking the piss" the entire time.
Two years later, speaking to GQ, he made his feelings about the whole thing abundantly clear.
"Now, it's not something I would go to," he said.
"I'd rather be sitting at my house, doing something productive, than dressing up in really expensive clothes and being photographed on a red carpet. To do the self-indulgent 'look at me, I'm amazing' thing on the red carpet. It's not me."
He did add, gentlemanly, that Gigi "stole the night" with her stained glass dress. "Everyone else just put a cross on."
SZA walked the 2022 Met Gala Red Carpet, smiled for the cameras, and then slipped out back.
"I snuck out the back," she admitted to Finish Line Women's Community Voices.
"I just tiptoed a couple of blocks and caught a yellow cab back to my hotel because I was overwhelmed."
Her anxiety had made the whole thing impossible to enjoy, and she hadn't even liked her outfit to begin with.
"I hated my outfit, that was another mental health thing.
"You want to do your job, you want to show up, and all these people are excited for you to be there, but it's like, 'Damn, I don't feel confident, I don't feel comfortable."
Amy Schumer attended the 2016 Met Gala, got to meet Beyonce, and used the moment to announce her retirement from the event very sharply.
"It's people doing the impression of having a conversation," she told Howard Stern.
"I don't like the farce. We're dressed up like a bunch of f*cking assholes. I got to meet Beyonce, and she was like, 'Is this your first Met Gala?' And I was like, 'It's my last.'"
It wasn't though, she went back in 2017 and 2022, which tells you everything you need to know about the gravitational pull of the event, even for those who can't stand it.
In 2013, Gwyneth Paltrow told USA Today she was 'never going again' after finding the event too crowded, too hot and throughly not a good time.
She said: "It was so un-fun. It was boiling, it was too crowded, I did not enjoy it at all."
She returned in 2017 in a pale pink Calvin Klein dress, with $2.5 million diamond earrings.
And again in 2019.