She’s got a paradise camouflage

Like a whip-crack sending me shivers

She’s the boat in a strip mine ocean

Riding low on the drunken rivers

She’s alone in the new pollution

She’s alone in the new pollution

Beck, The New Pollution

Understood as the intersection between between the world of the human and the inhuman, between the work of art and the commodity (2.13), the celebrity configures itself as the sovereign of our time; the soft dictator of the secular empire of commerce. Media offers constant opportunities to verify this circumstance, but none as evident as the party offered annually by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, better know as the Met Gala. In fact, the theme for 2018, christened Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, allows us to appreciate the tensions that shape the figure of the sovereign-commodity within the context of hypersecularization.

A brief genealogy of fashion, celebrity—and secularization—ending in the 2018 Met Gala (1.12, 4.5, 4.12):

These are the generations of Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain and Coco Chanel, sons of Cristóbal Balenciaga who, after the WWII, had their own children. Dior, Balmain and Chanel had Hubert de Givenchy, Valentino Garavani, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera, who in turn had Gianni Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, Dolce & Gabbana and John Galliano.

One Day, during the first Trump Administration, Dior sewed a dress with a crown and a black veil for Cara Delevingne. Balmain sewed a long tailed dress with a sequinned cross for Jennifer Lopez. Chanel sewed a white veil gown for Anna Wintour, the hostess of the gala. Givenchy sewed a transparent black dress with a graphite halo for Lily Collins. Valentino sewed a red gown with a thorn tiara for Anne Hathaway. Yves Saint Laurent sewed a black lace slit-dress for Zoe Kravitz. Oscar de la Renta sewed a virgin gown with a mantilla for Kate Bosworth and a black-red gradient gown for Nicki Minaj. Carolina Herrera sewed a red gown with a golden halo with multiple rays for Amber Heard. Ralph Lauren sewed a beige gown with floral designs accompanied by a golden circular halo for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. 

Versace sewed an armor-dress in chain mail for Zendaya and a golden dress with angel wings for Katy Perry. Jean Paul Gaultier sewed a black gown with a see-through cross on the chest, a fishnet veil and a crown made of crosses for Madonna. Dolce & Gabbana sewed a golden gown with red hearts and a nativity scene embedded on an oversized tiara for Sarah Jessica Parker. Galliano sewed a gown-coat with a papal mitre for Rihanna.

Lost in this “new pollution,” these media sovereigns attempt a paradoxical feat: approaching the religious substrate of sovereignty—whose nature is alien to modern sovereignty—without banalizing it. Of course, the result of the operation is the co-optation and transformation of religious symbols into yet another commodity.

The conjunction of fashion and Catholicism has an immediate reference in the western pop imaginary: Madonna. As could be expected, the Queen of Pop was in charge of the main event of the evening. The concert—which revolved around Like a Prayer, the 1989 hit which caused a scandal by its erotic, racial and religious connotations—focuses on her transformation from a hooded monk who who upon being disrobed transforms into a warrior-virgin (Joan of Arc) donning a crown of thorns, a white bodice and the chain mail arm piece of an armor. A striking combination that, by peeling the layers of sovereignty so to speak, highlights two of its aspects: that of guardian of the tradition and inner warrior. These layers reveal a whole constellation of polarities implicit in the idea of sovereignty: interior/exterior, surface/core, sacred/profane, religious/secular, tame/irate, social/individual.

En su papel como una de las soberanas-mercancía más importantes de los últimos cuarenta años, la Reina del Pop hace una síntesis de la evolución de la soberanía occidental, centrada en su paso de lo religioso a lo secular y de lo colectivo a lo individual.