[New York, July 27. Image via INFDaily]

The trouble with last night's party at the Met, if I may speak frankly, is that it was a little like being sucked into a sequined wind tunnel. It started with a little breeziness before the superhero displays—Oh, hey, Narciso and Claire! Hi Liya! Alessandra! Isaac! Diane! Tom!—and then, suddenly, people seemed to be flying around the room....But I thought Anna Wintour looked great in her Chanel dress—fantastical fashion....And though I didn't see Victoria Beckham until later, in pictures, her lace Armani coat dress was definitely a look—Hollywood grandeur with a wink. Zac Posen and his date Kate Mara, in outfits painfully inspired by Superman, get the try-harder award. I'll be interested to know who you all thought looked super—and not.

One could probably read as many metaphors about the transformative power of fashion in the silver-sequined, elaborately padded Chanel gown that Anna Wintour wore to the Costume Institute gala on Monday night as one could in Superman's cape, which happened to be hanging in a gallery down the hall. The floor-length dress had curiously curling crescents attached at the hips and the shoulders, giving Ms. Wintour, the Vogue editor and overseer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Party of the Year, the fuller-bodied appearance of Botticelli's Venus on her clamshell. She seemed to be broadcasting a message of total earthly control. (Or it could have been that all the Vogue assistants standing along the way to Ms. Wintour's receiving line had been strictly instructed not to speak to anyone, not even to people they recognized, or that so many guests were unusually prompt.) With this year's gala titled "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy," Ms. Wintour pointed out that she was Storm, the "X-Men" character. "I control the weather," she said.

Blake Lively wore black gloves and a snug black Ralph Lauren gown involving feathers. She said that her favorite superhero was "Spider-Man. Cause he's awesome! He gets to swing around, and, I don't know....I've always seen pictures growing up, being a teenager, and thought, 'I'd love to go to that, a night just to dress up in ball gowns.' And here I am!"...Vogue editor and hostess Anna Wintour was the first to arrive, at 6:33 p.m., wearing a Chanel gown adorned with what appeared to be seahorse tails and accompanied by daughter Bee Shaffer, who required two men, including the formidable Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley, to carry the train of her voluminous blue Nina Ricci dress up the stairs....Designer Phillip Lim came with teenage model-of-the-moment Chanel Iman,..."I've been here last year, and this is her first time here, so she's the newbie...it's a lot of pressure."

It was a silver moment for Julia Roberts, wearing a swoop-neck dress by Giorgio Armani, who underwrote the event. Her co-chairs were Clooney and Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who wore a Superwoman creation by Chanel with snakes of padding at shoulders and thighs. Fashion's superheroes included Donatella Versace, who dressed Janet Jackson in a cut-away back dress, Karl Lagerfeld, wearing a sparkling silver jacket while he dressed Kate Bosworth in a multicolored patchwork of vintage Chanel; and Valentino, who was with the model Claudia Schiffer wearing a frilled blue dress from the retired designer's last collection....The cast of the newly revived "Hair" sang "The Age of Aquarius" and "Let the Sun Shine In." David Bowie, sitting with his wife, Iman, looked pained at this new rendition of the counterculture musical.

[George] Clooney joked that he had wanted to dress as Batman, but the costume was already in the exhibition, so he settled for a midnight blue Giorgio Armani tuxedo. Anna Wintour, shimmering in silver cyber-couture, by Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, declared: "I stopped the rain"....The tennis star Venus Williams and American Vogue's editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, shared a red satin, super-cape for two that was custom-made by Chanel. The actress Scarlett Johansson wore a Dolce & Gabbana gown with a large diamond solitaire which announced her engagement to the actor, Ryan Reynolds. The designer Marc Jacobs confessed to wearing Superman underwear beneath his tuxedo....The "Superheroes" exhibition opens with a mirrored illusion of Clark Kent morphing into Superman and features radical catwalk creations by some of the world's top designers and comic book costumes from Hollywood blockbusters such as Spiderman and Batman.

It's the Oscars of the fashion industry, but if the looks on parade at Monday's Costume Institute gala in New York were anything to go by, that industry is in a sorry state of disarray. Hosted by Vogue editor Anna Wintour (in a Starlight Express moment, perhaps taking the superhero theme somewhat literally) and Giorgio Armani (looking as buff, relaxed and fashionably weathered as ever) the normally ultra-glamorous event fell flat as the proverbial pancake, where the frocks were concerned at least....how about Katie Holmes, who's clearly sharing a sunbed with her new best friend, Victoria Beckham? Someone really ought to have warned her that tomato red and orange is a challenging colour combination and that her razor-sharp bob is more Playmobil nurse than intergalactic heroine. And what of the aforementioned Mrs Beckham? Even by this particular fashion car crash's standards, her dress was disastrous. Nancy Reagan circa 1985, anyone? That cool-as-a-cucumber chignon, meanwhile, isn't kidding anyone. A Hitchcock heroine the artist formerly known as Posh most certainly is not.

Armani dressed Clooney and Roberts. "He asked me very sweetly if I'd be his date," Roberts, wearing a platinum Giorgio Armani Privé gown, said about the designer, who also outfitted other A-list celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Beyoncé Knowles and John Mayer....Clooney was taking it all in stride. "I get to have a drink. It's easy for me," he said. As for the superhero theme, he said he had a favorite when he was a kid: "Well, you know, I loved one that no one ever talks about, the Green Hornet. He was really cool." [Thandie] Newton, in a short dress in black lace with a long cape, said, "I like this because it's one look — and two looks. She made up her own superhero inspiration. "I'm Love Woman," she said. "I wanted to do a bit of skin."

"I think the secret of a good exhibition is when it happens very easily, which is what happened here," Anna Wintour told us of the Metropolitan Museum's Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy installation. We had many more looks in the exhibition than we could use, so [the idea] is obviously, once you start to look, really out there. It was largely Andrew [Bolton, the exhibition curator]'s vision that brought it all together but we've been very fortunate that at the same time," she added. "All these movies are coming out and the Olympics are coming up, so it all sort of came together."

Holy Stars, Batman! It was a celeb-studded affair at the Metropolitan Museum on Monday night as the world's fashion elite and Hollywood heavyweights met on Fifth Ave. to kick off the Costume Institute's latest exhibit, "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy." And while the night's theme celebrated cat suits and unitards, the red carpet featured far more glam getups: Co-hosts Julia Roberts and George Clooney giggled together as they strolled in wearing Giorgio Armani. "I wore the dress because he made it for me," said Roberts, who gave the designer, who sponsored the evening with Vogue magazine, a hug....Fashion darling Zac Posen took the theme seriously, rocking out Clark Kent-worthy spectacles and revealing his own secret identity. "I worked here as an intern for three years," he said. "I got paid $60 to do the event."

But as it happened, I was in the throes of fixing my nerdiness on a wholly new obsession: fashion magazines. I was gangly, and introverted, but suddenly, surrounded by other gangly introverts that didn't seem so shameful. For the first time, in fact, I was able to see myself as something other than a mere nerd. I could be a vaguely stylish nerd. But more than that, I could start to see clothes as something other than a caste system, and Versace was a testament to that. It wasn't the sort of label a 13-year old nerd — or a 23-year-old nerd — wants to aquire for oneself. (I've never purchased anything Versace because, well, duh.) But it did represent something fun, and vibrant, and almost wholesome in its decadence. Versace seemed above the fashion editor fray — it had a whimsical irrelevant spirit, an unabashedly explosive color palette, a version of sexuality so amplified that it was almost camp. (Well, "almost" is debatable.) And it never seemed afraid to laugh — at itself, at life. Versace was so celebatory, so liberating — to me it represented what fashion was at its very best, even if its aesthetic was worlds away from the black-on-black-on black uniform I started sporting around then and still live in. Versace made fashion look like nothing but carefree fun — it was like the very best game of dress-up. If you live in suburban Atlanta, can anything seem more fabulous than a life where one might be able to where a giant safety pin dress (a la Liz Hurley) to the grocery store? Or the dry cleaners, perhaps? Because that was what I loved about Versace: Its humor was so obvious my fantasies or running mundane errands while clothed and accompanied by Gianni himself seemed so...possible.

Which is why it was so hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that someone would want to kill this man. Not only had he not done anything wrong, but he had done something right! He made people smile! How could you not feel better just looking at Gianni Versace-designed garments? I sat in a stupor on the stoop outside my dormroom. I hurt because this kind of death seemed as innocent as my ideas of fashion itself: There were no motives other than insanity.

Cathy Horyn clearly felt differently. For her, the Versace death revealed to her how financially fragile the whole family was, how fragile the people behind the impossibly confident name. His death, for her, was an event to which she was jaded before it even occured. After all, Graydon was calling and hounding her with questions (what a bother!) and someone else had landed the story at Vanity Fair (how unfair!) and those Versaces were at last exposed that they weren't as glamorous or carefree or optimistic as they made out to be.

Well, of course they weren't. But for me, the murder of Gianni Versace somehow solidified my naivite, or, perhaps, my desire to find fashion perfectly beautiful. I didn't know about Donatella and her tanorexia or Allegra and her anorexia or the silly excessive Miami lifestyle or the silly excessive lifestyle anywhere. I didn't even get that the Medusa logo was hideously absurd. Versace's death managed to permanently preserve for me what I believed to be the Versace spirit: the impossibility and lack of reason behind his muder seemed, in my adolescent mind, to somehow go hand-in-hand with the impossibily and lack of reason behind the palpable Versace zest for life and beauty. Versace to me will always be Versace then: Gianni Versace and his death will always be simultaneously just-happening in my mind, one just developing its own opinions and style and which will always hold Versace out to be that as it should have been.

The Murder On Ocean Drive [NYT]