What Is With... this Chanel ambassador wearing jeans to the Met Gala?

SINGAPORE – Jeans are in the crosshairs once again. Not a year since American actress Sydney Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle denim campaign, another pair of casual bottoms at the Met Gala in New York has come under scrutiny.

Indian model and Chanel ambassador Bhavitha Mandava made her debut at the annual ball on May 4 in jeans and a quarter zip, immediately dividing the internet.

The outraged have accused the French fashion house of racism, dressing the 26-year-old in rags to the other attendees’ riches. By contrast, her fellow ambassadors Margot Robbie, Jennie, Ayo Edebiri and Gracie Abrams came in gowns of golden lame, feathers, sequins and embroidered crystals.

Defenders of Mandava’s look insist on the soundness of the idea. In the buffet of default gowns, she stood out more.

The discourse is complicated by the model’s backstory. The look is a callback to Mandava’s viral opening walk at Chanel’s 2025 Metiers d’Arts show, staged in an abandoned subway station in New York.

The model appeared then in jeans and a similar half-zip sweater, one hand in her pocket. That breezy walk, coupled with the crowd-pleasing story of her discovery by a modelling agent on a subway platform the year before, catapulted the New York University graduate to internet fame. The look is her signature.

Mandava, who is the first Indian model to open a Chanel show, told British Vogue of the Met Gala look: “I had to pause when I saw the sketch because that subway show was already one of the most significant nights of my career.

“Turning it into something reimagined for the Met felt like carrying that memory forward, but in a more elevated way that still respects the original spirit and the theme of the evening.”

The more interesting layer is the night’s Fashion Is Art theme. The laid-back outfit broke all the rules of occasion dressing, an agitation with a whiff of Dada, the post-World War I international art movement whose embracing of the ugly and ready-made was at the time aggressively “anti-art”.

Like Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture Fountain (1917), the outfit pitched the banal as worthy of the gallery. The late French-American artist had presented a urinal signed R Mutt for exhibition by experimental art group Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. It was rejected then as immoral.

And like Fountain, the jeans scandalised because of context. Casual Friday at a ball?

Duchamp’s bold work is now credited as the origin of conceptual art. Mandava’s jeans holds equal promise to shift focus from bourgeois beauty to provocative ideas. They seemed to say: If fashion is indeed art, then it can and should match art’s nerve.

All this is bang on theme for the recent Met Gala. People tend to forget that the bash is a fund-raiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Its latest exhibition, which the gala celebrated, pairs 200 garments and accessories with 200 artworks from the Met’s collection.

The radical idea here is to consider art in the context of the fashion pieces in the show, rather than the other way round – upsetting a traditional hierarchy in which fashion is diminutive to fine art.

Mandava’s jeans went one step farther, suggesting that even everyday clothes can be art.

Chanel later revealed that the explosive jeans were not jeans at all, but a silk muslin printed with a blue denim effect that took the house’s artisans 250 hours to make. It is a twist worthy of contemporary art, with works often criticised for looking too simple. Sceptics often say “I could make that”; Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy retorts: “Could you?”

Though the jeans are a mille-feuille of ideas, it is debatable whether they worked.

Detractors rightly pointed out that Mandava looked underdressed beside glitzier guests and the artisan-ness of the pants was not apparent in photos – a reminder that clothes are now primarily encountered as images and any styling must take the camera into account.

It also revives that contemporary art dilemma of idea versus beauty. To which side should one err when too little of either could mean failure? Fashion, in particular, has a primary obligation to visuals.

But even if the contentious look leaned too heavily on ideas, it is an excellent “failure”. It might not have looked like much but boy, was it fun to think about – the kind of thinking that enhances the looking.

And in the final analysis, what do you call fashion that satisfying? Probably art.