The world’s a stage, we’re the players, and Met Gala 2023 is a night of interactive theatre — with Met Gala memes, jokes, and TikToks in full force already.
The party, on paper, is a big, posh fundraiser that supports the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. But materially, it’s a night to witness celebrities, to discuss and to judge, and if you’re on the Internet, it’s your chance to get a hit tweet off the ground. The rich and famous present themselves for the approval of a jury of hundreds of thousands of people with Twitter accounts. The Met Gala is, after all, a costume party, and what’s a costume party without a winner? It’s a night where champions are crowned, and icons are born.
The Internet blossoms into Met Gala jokes slowly in the days prior. The snarkiest members of fashion Twitter and the snarkiest members of pop culture Twitter begrudgingly join forces as they tweet through their evening of eye rolls and exclamations. And we couldn’t be more grateful for the colour commentary on Fashion’s Biggest Night. The whole online affair speaks to our sick nature – it gives us something to root for alongside our fellow man, and something to carnivorously tear apart.
So here we are, citizens, on the first Monday in May of 2023, paying homage to a designer known by some for the professional iconography of his work and by others for the personal iconography of his ponytail and sunglasses. May tonight’s Internet feast be indulgent.
Check out all the best Met Gala 2023 memes, jokes, and TikToks.
Jason Derulo’s Big Fall
This one comes up every year. It’s more of an old folktale than a meme at this point. But we love it, don’t we? For those who need an origin story, the joke began almost a decade ago in 2015 thanks to a misunderstanding on Twitter, which, in hindsight, inspires a complicated sense of dread inside me. Anyway, the fall didn’t actually happen, but Jason Derulo has never managed to catch a break.
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Jimin Stans vs. the World
Park Jimin is expected to make his Met Gala debut, and his fans are already getting defensive. As excited as the crowd is to see him make his big appearance, some of them are already bracing themselves for the possible wave of critics. He’s a beauty, so no doubt he’ll look good, but high fashion Twitter wants to see more than a pretty face on the Met Gala 2023 carpet — they want a celebrity to deliver.
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Choupette Lagerfeld: A Feline of Beauty
Perhaps more iconic than Karl Lagerfeld's ponytail is his beloved rich bitch cat, Choupette Lagerfeld. Though the fashion icon announced on an Instagram post that she would not be attending the Met Gala honoring her dad, high fashion Twitter is eager to see Choupette's legacy celebrated in conjunction with Karl's. Kim Kardashian has made the first move, confirming her Met Gala attendance last week by posting pictures of herself with Choupette. The Internet has mixed reviews on Kim's Choupette post, though I guess that's kind of a given for her.
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Suki Waterhouse Understood the Assignment
Suki Waterhouse is slowly becoming a People's Princess for me. The singer posted on her TikTok that she thought the theme was Karl Marx and then suggested a theme and outfit change: that staged paparazzi photo of Grimes reading the Communist Manifesto on the corner of a crosswalk. Perhaps this is no different than the category of Met Gala outfits with social justice slogans written on them, but fair to say, I'm a little charmed.
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Men on Red Carpets and the Bare Minimum
Listen, men wear plain suits on red carpets all the time and that's a conversation for another day, but my god, it is a costume party! With a theme! Enough! It's depressing to see men take the opportunity to be fun and hot and ruin it by wearing what they could wear to a funeral.
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Rihanna's Tardiness
A new level of fashionably late is about to be achieved tonight. Over an hour into the start of the red carpet, Rihanna was seen finally arriving to her hotel to get ready. That's incredible. Her lack of urgency is the object of all of my envy. You'll never be as apathetic as Rihanna is.
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This article was originally published on Teen Vogue.
