Last year on Cher Scholar I made a lot of recipes from Cher books and created a new space for Cher foods and I refreshed the Dolls section (including all the doll outfits, which seemed so extravagant and were very fashion-forward for their late-1970s time). And then I re-read her beauty book Forever Fit and was going to make this year all about refreshing my Cher Scholar beauty pages.

Fashion and beauty are a huge part of the Cher cosmos and so it’s ironic that this year’s first big blog post on beauty and fashion should be so polemical.

Cher recently made a big splash on the red carpet of the Met Gala on 4 May 2026. She and Stevie Nicks were cited as highlights of the event.

Cher wore a dress designed by Daniel Lee, the creative director of Burberry. She was joined on the red carpet by her stylist for the event, Patti Wilson. Here is a video showing the press insanity, Patti Wilson and how the dress moves.

Cher with people:

Cher getting made up for the event (this was a treat):

Cher showing off her earrings:

And this was my favorite photo of Cher alone in front of the photographers. Nothing shows continued cultural relevance like a hoard of rabid photographers in a frenzy over your appearance. This picture reminds me of a very similar and famous picture taken of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at the Lawrence of Arabia premiere in 1962.

Cher in 2026:

Taylor and Burton in 1962:

And because Jeff Bezos and his wife were the lead sponsors of this year’s gala (spending $10 million on the event), the event has received some criticism and re-evaluation

So although the criticism was limited to Jeff Bezos and not at Cher directly, it was a kind of landmark event in showing how people are starting to feel about celebrity culture, especially display of extreme wealth paraded in a grotesque way.

Someone asked on a Facebook Cher-fan page what people thought about Cher attending. This person was shortly was accused of “trying to start an argument.” But I thought it was a fair question for a fan to ask, especially since non-Cher fans are talking about the Met Gala. There’s a bigger world out there. If you want to live under a rock as a Cher fan, I cannot do the same. Often I’m in the position of being a fan of something and yet not being able to tow-the-line among the fan group. But liking everything is just unrealistic and inauthentic, not to mention impossible.

Plus, I want to try to understand Cher in the context of the larger culture.

Some fans responded to that questioning thread with knee-jerk defenses. One person I know claimed Cher was not political implying should be except from criticism here for that reason. Which is just silly because Cher has always been political, since at least the 1970s.

She might have been less interested in politics than Sonny in the 1960s but she showed up to protests a few times with him. She famously spared with Sonny about presidential candidates in 1977 and in the 1990s and afterwards repeatedly phoned in to CNN to express political opinions and vocally supported many presidential candidates over the years including Ross Perot, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. She has been consistently outspoken about her dislike of Donald Trump in interviews. So to say she’s not political is just incorrect.

As a fan, I understand that it’s easy to feel uncomfortable when you’re happy about something other people are unhappy about. We like to see Cher show up at these fashion events. See what she’s wearing. See how’s she’s wearing her hair. Who is she taking photos with?

I also like to see Cher doing what I think she enjoys doing. And she loves fashion design. In interviews at the event, she seemed genuinely interested in finding out what the younger people were doing in fashion and where things were heading creatively. Along with fashion week, this might be one of Cher’s favorite events and it’s understandable she might not want to miss it. Clothes and fashion are definitely part of her creative work.

As I fan I’m sympathetic to that but I am feeling equally sympathetic to the mood of the world.

We are squarely set in the turmoil of another Gilded Age, with income disparity at an all-time high and with political corruption just as pervasive. Our tech gurus have sold us out. Wages have stagnated for decades. Inflation has skyrocketed.  Basic health care is out of reach for more and more people every day. Affordable rents are a thing of the past. All this while the billionaire class keeps compounding their bloated on the backs of the lower classes, phasing good jobs out of existence and squeezing all the value out of all corporate products just so that stockholders can continue to see growth in their mutual funds every year. It you can’t see all this by now, you’re living in a bubble.

After the Met Gala, a friend of mine forwarded this anonymous post that’s been going around publicly on Facebook. It’s  from “a private group” and shows a photo of Sarah Paulson wearing a mask made out of a dollar bill, a sort of protest from the inside that some found hypocritical. (However you gotta do it, I say, from the inside, from the outside, all the things.)

But here is the bottom line: times are changing and the suffering is becoming untenable. Events like this are becoming bad optics. As a Cher fan, we might love them but we’re a shrinking island of “common people” who think these events are cool.

There’s a lot in this anonymous Facebook statement that is truth. I’ve bolded some parts of it.

“There’s something about watching people spend $100,000 on a single evening while others struggle to afford groceries that just doesn’t resonate anymore.

And it’s not about hating success, beauty, art, or celebration.

It’s the disconnect people are feeling.

The normalization of extreme luxury beside everyday survival. The way spectacle is amplified while real human struggle becomes background noise..

What’s strange is that we’ve been conditioned to see these events as aspirational…but more and more people are looking at them and feeling absolutely nothing.

Not inspired. Not connected. Just aware of how disconnected modern celebrity culture has become from ordinary human life.

And yes fashion is art. I don’t think most people disagree with that.

Fashion can be expressive, symbolic, emotional, creative, and deeply human.

But somewhere along the way, parts of modern celebrity culture stopped feeling artistic…and started feeling performative.

Not creative in a grounded way. Just louder. More excessive. More shocking. More detached from ordinary life.

At some point, it stops feeling like genuine artistic expression and starts feeling like spectacle for the sake of virality and attention, even symbolic to deeper truths.

And I think that’s why so many people look at events like the Met Gala now and feel disconnected instead of inspired.

Because at some point, spectacle replaced substance.

It stopped feeling human.

I think more people are beginning to realize they don’t crave excess the way culture taught them to.

They crave depth. Authenticity. Community. Meaning. A life that actually feels human again.

Because at some point, many of us stopped being impressed by status…and started paying attention to energy instead”

Young people are having a completely different experience withmoney than we had. They no longer see a path to upward mobility. It’s like their new term parasocial, an idea that should make all my pop-musings obsolete before long. Why are we talking about people we don’t even know?

I think, politically speaking, that the move to focus on more local communities will actually be a positive change for everybody. In any case, kids are not as celebrity obsessed as Gen X and Boomer kids were. Big glamour doesn’t impress them anymore.

And you can dismiss that if you want.  But you’ll be fully ensconced in a reality of your own fantasies.

Besides, fashion is political. It just is. As much for the haves as the have-nots. And the world is considerably less safe in so many ways for many people Cher cares about, not just fans and other Americans but people in her own family group. So it’s impossible to believe she is not feeling political, now more than ever. Despite fashion and because of fashion.

It’s like seeing Cher sometimes sitting next to Anna Wintour and then realizing Wintour is the devilish inspiration behind The Devil Wears Prada movies. But I’m 100% sure, Ann Wintour is delightfully nice to Cher.  Because, well Mom, Cher is a rich man. And a rich man who dresses well.

Yes, Cher is a rich man, a fact Republicans love to point out any time Cher makes a political statement they don’t like. Even though they more often rich themselves. Cher can demure from these big wealthy events (but I doubt she would want to) but she can’t really act performatively poor.

(Speaking of the days when Cher was poor, as I was writing this I had to hire a tree service in Albuquerque and the owner proudly stated to me that he was born in El Centro, California. He said he knew who Cher was but had no idea Cher was also born in El Centro).

Anyway, I do not know what the answer is to all this but I do know that whatever social currency you once received by telling your non-Cher-fan friends or your Met-Gala-fashion friends that Cher killed it at the Met Gala in 2026, well that social currency has likely gone down in value today, just like the value of everything else.