Kylie Jenner’s selfie

The celebrity-packed squad goals selfie is the Vanity Fair gatefold cover for the social media age. It is quite possible that cut-throat LA publicists spent the weekend negotiating their clients’ exact placement in this image, taken by Kylie Jenner and posted on Instagram. Timing your entrance and perfecting your duck face to engineer the traditional red-carpet arrival moment is no longer enough.



This selfie is incontrovertible evidence that the Kardashian crew have audaciously land-grabbed the Met as a publicity powerbase from under the nose of the official homecoming queen, Anna Wintour. As host, Wintour’s edicts specifically forbid use of social media, a ban that Jenner ignored. The photo is very much a family affair, the art direction borrowing heavily from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Kim Kardashian, naturally, stars as Jesus. A$AP Rocky, Kendall Jenner’s hitherto-rumoured boyfriend, is officially inducted into the clan, since the photo also serves as the couple’s coming-out portrait.

Taking selfies in the bathroom is to this decade what smoking on the balcony was to the last decade: where you find the in-crowd at any party. As well as Brie Larson, Lily Aldridge and Paris Jackson, if I’m not mistaken I can see Frank Ocean, last spotted sprinting up the Met steps to avoid the paparazzi but looking thrilled to make it into this photo. To truly win the modern Met Gala, you need to get in this frame.

This was Wintour’s ninth consecutive year of flouting the dress code. Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Anna Wintour in Chanel

Wintour is, as ever, a stone-cold #girlboss masterclass. The editrix is never afraid to pull rank, and uses her Met Gala outfit to remind the world that she has above-the-title billing at this event. In 2014, the renovated costume space was named the Anna Wintour Costume Center in her honour. She is, therefore, the one person at the event more important than the designer, a point she has underlined by taking zero notice of the dress code and wearing lush Chanel column gowns for nine years out of the past 10. It was reported that when asked on the red carpet when she last wore Comme des Garçons, she responded: “Sometime back in the 80s.” Ouch.

TMI Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen ... Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Gisele and Tom Brady’s red carpet PDA

In appointing Gisele Bündchen and her athlete husband as co-chairs of the event, we assume Wintour wanted to add a heavyweight dose of mainstream-US-friendly glamour to a night honouring a Japanese avant-gardist. Bündchen, for her part, had her own publicity strategy for the night, using it as a platform to promote her marriage rather than herself as a fashion leader. She wore a simple dress and a sporty ponytail, and instead of relegating her beau to the sidelines, as is conventional on the red carpet, indulged in a handsy kissing session. She underlined her point with a cosy pre-party hotel-room, white-dressing-gown kissing selfie and another shot of her adjusting her hubby’s tie. Thanks, Gisele. We get it!



Sean Diddy Combs taking it easy. Photograph: Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

Sean Combs lying down

The white fur coat may be consigned to history, but once a diva, always a diva. While his girlfriend was working her angles for the photographers, Sean “Diddy” Combs lay down on the steps behind her, because he was “tired”. The image is a black-tie upgrade of a scene you can find outside the Topshop changing rooms on any Saturday afternoon. But it is also an epic photobomb that may well become a rallying call for downtrodden Instagram husbands all over the globe who are sick of life lived in the wings of fashion.



Naomi Campbell with Edward Enninful. Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Edward Enninful and his OBE

Madonna has seven Grammys. Brie Larson, Lupita Nyong’o and Gwyneth Paltrow have Oscars. But you know what they don’t have? Pretty medals proclaiming them to be Officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Edward Enninful, newly announced as the next editor of British Vogue does – he showed his pride by wearing the decoration on his Burberry tux. Wintour, Enninful’s counterpart in New York and a fellow OBE, no doubt approved.

