British fashion is crying out for its own Met Gala – but it’s not Vogue World

As a curtain-raiser for London Fashion Week, it was a world away from New York’s traffic-halting couture extravaganza — and more like a night at a tawdry shopping mall, writes Melanie Rickey

Sienna Miller at Vogue World (Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

The sequins may have settled, but we’re still scratching our heads. What exactly was Vogue World?

This celebrity-packed red-carpet event, held on Thursday at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane – which had been billed variously as “fashion’s big night out”, “a one-night-only performance” and “Britain’s answer to the Met Gala” – was so much more than just a relentlessly hyped curtain-raiser for London Fashion Week. And also, somehow, so much less.

If the sight of Sienna Miller displaying her naked baby bump cossetted in Schiaparelli couture and a final-curtain appearance by the original line-up of 90s supermodels – including a now-fully rejuvenated Linda Evangelista – were burning into your retina as you went to sleep last night, what you experienced was a militarily orchestrated global marketing campaign. The real Vogue World, if you will.

For Britain’s answer to the Met Gala was, in fact, an all-encompassing media assault, one that offered social-media saturation, spreads of best- and worst-dressed attendees in the morning papers – and the chance to shop the looks on show.

When pressed on the actual substance of Vogue World earlier this month, Anna Wintour told Samira Ahmed of BBC’s Front Row: “I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But, basically… it’s a group of wonderful, creative minds coming together and hopefully making an evening that will be culturally important but also, most importantly, lots of fun.”

Tellingly, Wintour had also let slip that her initial intention had been to create “a direct-to-consumer show”, one that would “really focus on fashion that was available immediately”. So not the Met Gala then.

New York’s traffic-stopping extravaganza – a three-tiered party, with a red-carpet appetiser followed by a glamorous charity dinner and after parties galore – is a long-established black-tie-and-couture benefit ball for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Fabulously starry, it is reserved exclusively for the world’s A-listers to dress up in custom-made fashion from the planet’s most talented designers. The resulting images are then beamed around the world, thus ensuring Vogue’s global fashion dominance. American fashion’s equivalent to the Hollywood Oscars, Wintour has been in charge of the guest-list clipboard since 1995.

Her first Vogue World London, by comparison, felt at times like a night at the shopping mall.

By her own admission, this is a fashion-selling event, one with its own merchandise collection of hoodies, sweatshirts and coffee cups, and a pop-up shop at Selfridges where a “Vogue World London” baseball cap costs £59. It exists to provide media coverage for its parent magazine. If you didn’t get a £150 seat to see the show in person, everyone is invited on social media. Can you get any less exclusive than that?

Attendees lining up on the red carpet to enter the theatre were none the wiser as to what the event might involve. Except that it was directed by Stephen Daldry, the Oscar-winner responsible for The Crown and who oversaw the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games; and that proceeds would go to fund UK art institutions, including the National Theatre and Royal Opera House.

After the best-of-British celebritydom had performed extensive twirls for the banks of cameras – there’s Sienna Miller hugging Kate Winslet! Alexa Chung’s in hotpants and a bonnet! Why on earth is James Corden here? – several young actors in tight sequin trousers took their turn under the flashbulbs.

Finally came the so-called main event. This turned out to be an admittedly rather fabulous 37-minute mash-up of fashion, dance, theatre, opera and catwalk moments designed to spotlight Britain’s world supremacy in the arts and point a finger to the recent funding cutbacks affected by the Arts Council.

Kate Moss, wearing John Galliano, pirouetted with award-winning young American soprano Hongni Wu as she sang the aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Stormzy performed “Crown” wearing a suit by Vivienne Westwood’s widower Andreas Kronthaler, while the actress Sophie Okonedo recited the “crown” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II.

FKA Twigs performed with members of the Rambert Dance Company and kissed Cara Delevingne — though it all felt very Madonna and Britney. Nevertheless, as Wintour had promised, it was fun with lashings of fashion. Even the theatre’s ushers were dressed in custom-red suits by Charles Jeffrey…

The sum of its parts failed to add up to anything close to a Met Gala. But all is #content.

Now don’t forget to buy the T-shirt.