Gwyneth Paltrow Waffles On Met Ball

Gwyneth Paltrow Image by Getty Images

By Anne Cohen May 17, 2013

Gwyneth Paltrow hated the Met Ball.

“I’m never going again,” she told USA Today. “It was so un-fun. It was boiling. It was too crowded. I did not enjoy it at all.”

Did Beyonce’s enormous train take up too much space? Was Marc Jacob’s suit too shiny? Were there too many plebs gawking from the sidelines? Who knows.

Nevertheless, the actress vowed never again, after walking down the red carpet in a hot pink Valentino gown. We accepted it, and moved on.

But in case you were curious about what it takes to look that good at a party you hate, Gwynnie described the process of choosing and fitting her Valentino gown with stylist Elizabeth Saltzman in this week’s GOOP newsletter. Every sketch, stitch, styling, and agonizing shoe-decision is meticulously documented, and despite her declaration that “we’re all a little too old to dress up punk,” Paltrow didn’t have a single bad word to say about the whole thing.

“The Met Ball, at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is always the year’s most elaborate display of incredible fashion and this year was no different,” the post reads. “The theme was ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ and when the house of Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri asked me to join them, I was thrilled to see what they would create with my right fashion hand, Elizabeth Saltzman.”

“We got all inspired in the goop office about punk making a comeback through subtle influence and thus, we asked one of my absolute favorite websites, the most excellently curated SSENSE, to show us how we could work it into our spring/summer wardrobes,” she added.

Maybe hanging out with the bright and beautiful wasn’t so bad after all.

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO