Carrie Marie Carey, who are you wearing?!
What do you do when you don’t feel like the red (or in this case, white abstract) carpet is giving? In the year of our lord 2023, you type a bunch of instructions into an AI generator and reimagine your own looks climbing the Met Gala steps instead – that is, if you’re Patric DiCaprio or Bryn Taubensee of cult NY-born, Paris-based label Vaquera.
Though Vaquera would have been a gold-star go-to for an homage to Karl Lagerfeld, given the designers got their start creating “fashion fan fiction” inspired by legendary designers like Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo, and Martin Margiela, they were woefully overlooked by attendees. And it’s not the first time: we’re still not over 2022, when the theme was literally American fashion and no one pulled their Stars & Stripes gown, or dove into their SS20 offering, which saw them pen a love letter to the strange and beautiful city of New York.
Of course, Vaquera have never really cared about stuff like that, anti-establishment as they are, but sometimes it’s fun to imagine, so last night the label generated a series of virtual gowns worn by fake celebrities and socialites, like September Evans. The virtual attendee posed for photographers in a bouncy blown-up ivory satin look, shortly ahead of Anita Kristiansen, who came dressed in a custom plastic dress with matching headpiece.
Joining them was Anita Lee, in a trash-made-treasure gown crafted from black bin bags, and Carrie Marie Carey, whose brown cocktail frock appeared to be sliding off her, resulting in what looked like a dirty protest pooling around her on the carpet (who knows: maybe that’s what drew the cockroaches in?) “Big thanks to #AnnaWintour and @vogue for approving all of our #controversial looks this year. It means so much to be a part of this special event,” the designers captioned one of the posts.
Taubensee and DiCaprio have been experimenting with AI for a while now, dotting their Instagram with Vaquera looks and campaigns imagined by computer programs. Joining them is Coperni, which went one step further at the AW23 Paris shows in March. The label littered its latest collection with AI-generated prints depicting an updated version of “The Wolf and the Lamb” which switched out the wolf for robots as part of an exploration of the changing relationship between man and machine. Wherever that might go, though, for now we’re happy just to have some inventive looks to scroll through in the endless sea of 2023 Met Gala content.