Chris Smalls, co-founder and former president of the Amazon Labor Union, was arrested at 8:15 p.m. Monday outside the Met Gala for jumping a police barricade in the museum forecourt. [1] He was charged with resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, trespass, disorderly conduct and failure to obey traffic devices. The paper's Saturday account treated Jeff Bezos's roughly $10 million honorary chair sponsorship as the night's exhibit. Day six has not softened it.

The gala raised $42 million, a record, with Silicon Valley underwriting an unusually large share of the table cost. [2] Across town, in the Meatpacking District, the Service Employees International Union, the Strategic Organizing Center and the Amazon Labor Union staged a worker-led runway show called the Ball Without Billionaires. Models were current and former Amazon, Whole Foods, Washington Post, Starbucks and Uber workers, dressed by emerging immigrant and BIPOC designers. The theme was "Labor Is Art." [3]

A list of high-profile no-shows — Mahmoud Mamdani, Meryl Streep, Zendaya, Bella Hadid, Billie Eilish — gave the absence its own headline. [2] The Bezos honorary-chair line was the first time in the gala's history that a single private individual underwrote the lead sponsorship. The counter-show's organizers said it would not be the last.

The cultural arithmetic the gala ran on for three decades — billionaire money, designer access, celebrity attendance, philanthropic cover — produced this year a lawsuit-eligible misdemeanor at the barricade and a runway across town in which the people who pack Bezos's warehouses wore the borrowed couture.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York