I have a beef with those among us who have a beef with the Met gala. A bone to pick is probably better since many of the women at the gala have that lean — banana-split-deprived lean — and hungry look. The annual gala starts the May art season in New York and raises money for the Met’s Costume Institute, the department that deals with the art history of fashion. The gala was also the opening event for the Costume Institute’s blockbuster exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. It’s the splashiest social event of the year.

Friends tell me they think the gala signals social collapse. “Happy to be decadent” or “depraved” or “tasteless” or “just plain weird,” the partygoers — or at least their outfits — seem to proclaim. At $75,000 a ticket, the gala entitles buyers to proclaim whatever they want, but, really, some, like J. Harrison Ghee, went for a look that’s too various. Shown too many options, Ghee was, to borrow from Oklahoma, a “girl who can’t say no.” I’m not surprised. Ghee uses he/she/they pronouns and is “nonbinary” and “pansexual.” Too much and too many.

For this story, I will not critique anyone’s politics, no matter how repulsive, sinister, simpleminded, tiresome, or juvenile.

I watched the red-carpet gala walkathon and looked at press photos of all the guests. That’s 400 people and many acres of silk, satin, velvet, wool, lace, cotton, leather, cellophane, denim, and recycled plastic, millions of beads, sprinkles, and grains of sand, and miscellaneous materials like Del Ray’s twigs, a poem sewn into the inside of the jacket worn by race-car driver Lewis Hamilton, wallpaper for Demi Moore’s dress, and Taylor Russell’s simulated-wood corset, which started with a body scan so it would fit her tightly and exactly.

Yes, $75,000 a ticket is ostentatious consumption, but gala-goers such as Erykah Badu, Doja Cat, and FKA Twigs didn’t pay. Fashion houses, record labels, and gazillionaires like Jeff Bezos sponsored tables and invited, here and there, glam guests. That’s fine. It’s a fundraiser. And what’s more humane, kindlier and gentler, as George H. W. Bush would say? The Met gala or, a few miles north, on the Columbia campus, signs reading “Go Back to Poland” and “Keep the World Clean,” with a Star of David tossed in a trash can? I’ll take Lana Del Ray, whose gala dress looked like a tree, over the keffiyeh-wearing, Covid-mask-disguised, lard-assed, pimply Bolshivettes who look like tents having a bad-tent day.

Yes, too, the world’s a mess, and here in the U.S. things seem to be going from bad to worse, but let’s not shun a party, especially if it’s for a good cause. Scolds, flagellants, commissars, killjoys, and drudges be damned. Most of the world’s woes and ours exist because people in power in Washington listen to these Jeremiahs. The Met gala’s not raising money for the DAR, the Omaha Knitters Guild, or Hutterite orphans. It’s at the Met, not the Grange. It’s going to be glitzy.

And I loved seeing the art, which is fashion, with the body as the canvas. The designers and fabricators are among the best in the world, and the vast majority are American. I was unburdened by the fame of the guests, since I’d never heard of most of them. Bad Bunny, Law Roach, and Quannah Chasinghorse are new to me, as are Awkwafina, Shakira, and Zendaya, so famous they don’t need last names.

They all looked good. Zendaya triple-dipped. She arrived at the gala in a one-shouldered trumpet gown made from blue and green striped silk with grape and hummingbird embellishments. Before dessert, she switched to a black tulle skirt with a 20-foot train that had a fascinator packed with fresh roses. John Galliano designed both. He created the first one this year and for the gala. The black number dates to 1996, when he worked for Givenchy. The subtitle of Sleeping Beauties, recall, is Reawakening Fashion, which invited partiers to draw from fashion of the past. At the end, called up to the podium, Zendaya wore a tight white sequined gown with a V-neckline that gave new meaning to the word “plunger.”

In Vermont’s Ye Olde Arlington, where I live, we shop for clothes at the general store, shirts and socks next to pole trimmers and ammo. Meanwhile, Gigi Hadid’s gown, designed by Thom Browne, had three-dimensional embroidered yellow roses and more than 2 million bugle beads. It took hundreds of his/her/them hours to make. All hands on deck. No plaid flannel at this party. No wash-n-wear, either. No coonskin caps, no muck chore boots, and no camouflage zip hoodies, not even for Bad Bunny.

The Costume Institute, holding 33,000 garments and accessories, isn’t unknown, but neither is it an obvious destination for Met visitors, though it should be. It’s the grandest and most comprehensive fashion museum in the world, with the Fashion Institute of Technology museum down the road and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in the running. Its exhibitions are good, its conservation department is formidable, its curators are top-notch, and it’s a full-fledged Met department.

Last week’s gala raised $26 million for the Costume Institute, multiples more than any of the hundreds of other Manhattan charitable galas. I don’t know whether that’s a gross take or profit but suspect it’s mostly profit. The big bucks come from table sponsorships. A big part of the institute’s budget goes to conservation. Textiles are notoriously fragile. Its conservators are like artists, chemists, and doctors.

I’m certain the Met took what was once the independent Museum of Costume Art with the understanding that it would never be a financial burden. Hence, the department-specific fundraising burden. Diana Vreeland started the gala as a serious fundraiser. Anna Wintour has led the charge for years. She does a fantastic job. And she looked fantastic. The Costume Institute’s annual gala generates the dough used to support a superb, labor-intensive, high-maintenance collection and good programs.

Fashion wasn’t always considered art, though it always has been, using textiles, gems, beads, sequins, here and there a feather, and an infinity of materials, among them the sand in the gala dress of South African singer Tyla. Don’t hope to see it in a museum. It didn’t survive the evening. That fashion was once on the fringe, so to speak, of what art historians and trustees considered art explains the Costume Institute’s funding. It floats in its own tub, to use an academic term, meaning it has to raise its own money.

The gala’s theme was drawn from Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, whose 250 featured objects can’t be worn again, owing to their fragility or because they’re made of materials meant to be used only once. They’ve effectively gone to sleep. The show highlights their beauty and delicacy but also the inevitability of decay — the decay of manmade things and as well as we mere mortals. It’s a vanitas exhibition, and these are among my favorites. The sculpted and engraved skulls in old New England graveyards send us a message from the dead. “As you are now, so once was I,” epitaphs read, “prepare for death and follow me.” That’s not meant to be a downer. It’s the way of all flesh.

The menu was spring-vegetable salad with elderberry foam dressed with raspberry vinaigrette and olive crumble that looked like soil — and I’m quoting the chef — followed by filet of beef floating on a pine-needle-and-mushroom “moat,” alongside an almond cremeux shaped like a small red-glazed apple that sat atop a walnut-flavored edible leaf. While I watched the red-carpet promenade, my dinner was a grilled pork chop via a local pig, boiled carrots, and Fig Newtons. And, yes, I wore flannel. It’s still cold in Vermont.

For gala gowns, flowers were big, but so was shattered glass for a broken-can’t-be-fixed look, nighttime black, and the barely-there look of Rita Ora, whose beaded curtain gown was downright ethereal, which means skimpy indeed. Some of the black attire signaled to me that a good, long snooze isn’t on the agenda. Dua Lipa’s black lace gown verged on lingerie, plus she’s Albanian, which suggests a wild time.

Cardi B’s black, long-trained, layered tulle dress weighs 160 pounds, and that’s not counting her 141-carat emerald necklace dangling from a strand of 127 carats of fancy-shaped diamonds. Tub or no tub, that thing’s not gonna float. It took six guys to maneuver it up the stairs. How does she go to the potty? She doesn’t. Cardi’s a star rapper, and that takes discipline. That girl can hold it in. I envy her. And I like her look. Commanding, resolute, no-nonsense, and elegant.

Fashion model Wisdom Kaye’s floor-length red coat had a withered, blackened hem that resembled a wilting rose. Amelia Gray Hamlin wore a terrarium for a skirt — a plastic, battery-lit bubble covered with transparent yellow silk. Inside were cut flowers and fake — I hope — butterflies. How does she sit down and eat? I wondered. The gala’s a banquet, after all.

These ladies don’t eat! That’s why they’re as skinny as an organza-draped rail. Well, Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the exception to the rule. Not one to skip an extra helping of fries, she looked fabulous in a long-train denim gown. Denim! There’s hope for we country bumpkins after all!

As a cohort, gala-goers were conservatively fabulous. Grace Kelly would have been very happy to wear Gigi Hadid’s dress. Nicole Kidman — holy mushroom moat, a partygoer I recognized — wore a Balenciaga flamenco-inspired gown. Lovely indeed, but, thematically, she veered off course. The show’s called Sleeping Beauties, and flamenco dancers are unusually restless. Amanda Seyfried’s dress looked like something Sargent would have painted. Jerry Seinfeld and his wife chose a reserved, normal look, as did almost all the married couples.

Lana Del Rey, idiosyncratically wearing a gown with a tree motif, dressed with classical erudition. Her Alexander McQueen dress quotes the Greek story of Apollo and Daphne. Pestered endlessly by Apollo, the mad god who loved her, Daphne turned herself into a laurel tree rather than submit. Now that’s taking yourself off the dating scene and going quiet.

Men get dressed for galas, too, and I saw lots of debonair looks beyond traditional black tie. Brooches are in style for artfully dressed men, and it’s about time. Men ought to project quiet authority, logic, and intellectual rigor, but what’s wrong with dash? Cufflinks and studs can do only so much. The actor Mike Faist wore a large radish brooch, by Loewe, made from beads. Teen Vogue called it a turnip, but what do dumb-girl city-slicker commies know? “Nothing” is the correct answer. Lots of men wore capes, a welcome sight.

Will and Jaden Smith’s two children, now young adults, seemed to dress with New York’s thug class in mind. They need a good slap. Of Cole Escola’s attire, all I can sing is the “Caisson Song.” He’s a walking argument for bringing back the draft. No straw-rabbit purses allowed. Jeremy Pope, the actor who played Jean-Michel Basquiat, wore no shirt, a tux jacket, a white boa-trimmed cape attached to his wrist, and a lady’s garter belt as a cummerbund. Bad Bunny went for the “Don Carlos” look, Franco Zeffirelli–conceived but incubated alongside Edward G. Robinson. He wore diamond-rimmed Tiffany glasses. Beyond rakish, yes, but it’s a party, and his first name is “Bad,” not “Bugs.”

I admire Anna Wintour, the editor of “Vogue,” gala mastermind, and the Costume Institute’s guru. She has raised many millions of dollars and given so much of her own time, talent, and treasure. She’s big in spirit, vision, and generosity, and I wish she’d show her proven sense and sensibility and give Melania Trump the attention and recognition she deserves as a fashion icon. Her exclusion from Vogue covers and stories is petty and vindictive. It doesn’t present Wintour in a charitable light. Covers saluting the attire of Washington wives here and there are frequent and seem to raise the question “who shot the couch.” No such questions can be raised about Mrs. Trump, who is always elegant.

Swept is the sand from Tyra’s dress. Returned are the diamonds, emeralds, and pearls borrowed from Cartier, Bulgari, and Boucheron. Abundantly bosomed gala-goers have been pried from tight-fitting dresses. There was a run on crowbars in Manhattan! Can you believe it? The Westminster dog show has rolled into town, so there are paws aplenty on the red carpet now. Rest assured, pups. Kristi Noem is in the doghouse in Pierre, wearing an electronic collar wired to alert ASPCA if she moves. If you see her anywhere near the city, call 1-800-RIN-TIN-TIN. He’ll drag her back to the Badlands.