Between intricate garments and a barrage of celebrity crossovers, it’s a merry-go-round of who’s wearing who at the opulent Met Gala, a lavish fundraiser evening for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute that also marks the opening of the museum’s latest exhibition.

However much awaited the Anna Wintour-chaired event is, it does seem to be equally riddled by protests year after year. Some are warranted, like the models protesting against known misogynist and homophobe Karl Lagerfeld being honored as the 2023 theme, or the Condé Nast union strike for unfair labor practices. Other times, it’s easier to feel like an unprecedented collision with current pressing issues, such as Black Lives Matter, climate change, and the Palestinian genocide. This year, even before the Monday red carpet on May 5, the annual benefit is already met with a discourse calling for its boycott.

It does leave space to wonder: Why is it that every year, the Met Gala encounters some form of protest?

There’s no denying that regardless of its fundraising aspects, the event is a monumental spectacle of wealth. Anyone from your favorite pop star and Oscar-winning Hollywood darlings to fashion moguls and social media influencers populate the uncrackable guest list each year, fueling both its mystique and mass appeal. Such a culturally impactful moment makes the evening a prime environment to beckon global attention to important causes.

Some took place on the red carpet itself, like congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s “tax the rich” Brother Vellies gown, Dan Levy’s Loewe ensemble featuring work by AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, or Pyer Moss’s two-piece tribute to Black and queer communities that designer Kerby Jean-Raymond himself debuted alongside Lena Waithe.

But US$75,000 (unless you’re a New York politician, who received invites) to walk a Vogue-commissioned red carpet in haute couture isn’t an experience most can spare some bank for. Their options are instead limited to the asphalt roads of Madison Avenue, stretching the length of Midtown Manhattan to the Upper East Side, just a block away from The Met’s Fifth Avenue location and a few steps away from the Mark and Carlyle hotels where high-profile attendees get all dolled up. The agenda is clear: To be seen, to be heard. Not just by New Yorkers, government officials, famous multi-millionaire and -billionaires, but also by the world.

But no matter how peacefully they raised their fists in solidarity of George Floyd with demands to defund the corrupt police system or chanted “free, free Palestine,” they were still arrested. The highly guarded gala seems to remain impervious to these political collisions, an escapist bubble—at least through Tuesday at sunrise—of blissful ignorance, separated by nothing more than the museum’s walls.

This year’s Met Gala has yet to happen, but even then a call for its boycott marred the weeks ahead of its soirée. Led by Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, the call is coming from within the house—sort of, as he previously was a writer for Vogue—with a vague message of “it’s not the time for a party like that.” The thirty-two-year-old is known for his sensational online presence, which he reveals to have been a strategy, but this time, at what cost?

Because, when looking at what kind of time it is, it’s a time for the Elon Musk-helmed Department of Government Efficiency posing a threat to museum funding, the Trump administration canceling grants and endowments for humanities programs, and the president’s dictatorship of the arts. Schlossberg’s calls for boycotting the Met Gala seem to echo a distasteful ring, especially with the Costume Institute’s exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, an ode to the intertwining threads between Black fashion and history, taking place amidst diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) initiatives under attack.

While it’s easy to brush off the museum’s fundraiser as a frivolous showcase of concentrated wealth, the other side of the coin that gets rarely brought up in conversations is its intent: preserving culture through fashion. It is manifest in this year’s theme, the first in which all co-chairs are Black, with a hosting committee also made up of influential Black individuals. Drawing from the 2009 book by exhibition curator Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, the Met’s head curator Andrew Bolton said, the exhibition highlights the Black dandy as “an identity signifier … in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”

As discourse surrounding how much of a capitalist sellout the Met Gala appears to be, there’s credence to believe its existence isn’t all invaluable. It is an indulgent spectacle. It is a parade of wealth. It is a jarring juxtaposition against actual political statements mere plebeians make, but it is a reflection of our capitalistically classist society.