Is the avant-garde dead or am I not invited to their parties?

At the end of a long metal chute, guests at the Bauhaus school’s 1928 ‘Metallic Party’ found themselves deposited in the first of a number of underground rooms faced in glittering white metal. Glass baubles, suspended from the ceiling, threw shadows across the floors, brass-coloured fruit bowls reflected the movements of dancers, and the clank of heavy costumes supported the jazz band’s rhythm section. One elaborately dressed woman coquettishly offered her wrist to other guests, dangling the there-affixed spanner before them and asking coyly if they might like to tighten her ‘loose nuts’.

The ‘Metallic Party’ was just one of the many lively events that characterised the Bauhaus’ social calendar. From the avant-garde art school’s opening in 1919, founder Walter Gropius sought to develop an atmosphere of good-natured collaboration and playfulness to support creative output. Central to his educational vision was the open expression of life in all its exuberant untidiness; the Bauhaus’ social and visual culture were entirely inseparable.

Parties, then, were joint efforts, ‘total’ works of art and experiments in communal living. The Stagecraft Workshop produced the fantastical costumes, Metalwork the elaborate decor, and Printing the invitation cards, which were then sent across Europe to artists, intellectuals and journalists. Invitations were extended to those closer to home, too. Dessau residents and local industrialists were called upon, if they were men, to attend dressed as water heaters, radios, or tin soldiers. For women, costume ideas included screws, sardine tins or spare change. All were to avoid coming as a fifth wheel if it could possibly be helped.

Gropius and his successors evidently understood the value of cultivating a guestlist. Not only were these parties an opportunity for creative inspiration, collaboration and playful experimentation, they were a means to secure funding and professional partnerships from local business magnates and to disseminate the Bauhaus brand across Europe via the press. The art school’s social capital could be used to cultivate its finances, and Gropius established a community that he, and his creative vision, were at the heart of.

The Bauhaus closed in 1933, but today, social capital remains closely tied to financial success. In a social economy, where, via the internet, millions can obtain visual access to once private spaces, controlling physical access to social events is increasingly a marker of power.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the annual Met Gala, held last weekend in New York City. The complex relationship of art and commerce was beautifully illustrated this year by the ‘Fashion is Art’ theme, sponsored by Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez. Sanchez sat as honorary co-chair alongside Anna Wintour, who personally approves each potential guest before they are sent an invitation, mentally cross-checking their names against her ‘death list’ of banned A-listers.

The all-knowing Wintour, then, wields absolute power, presiding over proceedings from the bottom of the Met steps in custom feathered Chanel. Images of guests flouncing over artificial moss up these newly paved steps are widely circulated online, but beyond the wisteria that shrouds the gala’s entryway, the event itself is shrouded in mystery. The viewer is resigned to hazy film photos of Charli XCX holding court in the smoking area captured on Alexa Chung’s handycam.

Wintour deftly wields celebrity to generate online interest, but limited access, visually and physically, to the event itself, makes securing an invitation all the more desirable. Financial capital helps here, both to cover the price of a table and for Wintour to view you as a worthwhile player. Understandable, given the gala is a fundraiser, but interesting, then, that this year saw more representatives from Silicon Valley than ever before. OpenAI, Meta and Snapchat each shelled out $350,000 for a table, and Wintour, by accepting them as guests, welcomed the world of Big Tech into the traditional cultural canon.

Wintour’s control of the guest-list makes her the most powerful person in the room because she, as a result, is a producer of culture. By facilitating conversations between fashion and technology, she influences future collaboration between these sectors. Tech-bros can become tastemakers.

The same power is wielded by the organisers of the supper-clubs which have been cropping up across the instagram-sphere in the last year, where charming young things can meet over plates of hipsi cabbage and yuzu negronis to talk about their recent trips to Japan, and access remains strictly controlled by financial and cultural capital.

These events inhabit an awkward position, straddling online and offline visibility, billed as community-building but posted across various platforms to advertise the seasonal menu developed by an attractive minor celebrity chef and the Ethiopian jazz spun on vinyl by a DJ who grew up in Highgate. By managing the guest-list, and crucially the seating plan, organisers introduce socially powerful people to socially powerful people.

If my unconscionable rudeness comes across as jealousy that’s because it is. Despite factors like cash flow and space perhaps preventing most of us from throwing a charity gala in our front rooms, the power that comes with cultivating a guest-list is readily attainable. All that it takes is a modicum of initiative. We create our own realities and have the power to change them, so planning an event and establishing connections within an existing network of friends could prove both an antidote to loneliness and a meaningful project. So this summer, I plan to host, to produce culture rather than passively consuming it. Play your cards right and you might be invited – just don’t come dressed as a fifth wheel.