The Last Journalist

Will The Costume Institute be the mausoleum of journalism? by Tarik Otmani

Anna Wintour (Credit, Jamie McCarthy - Getty Images)

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)

2026 Met Gala’s aftermaths raise an essential question: How the owner of The Washington Post, the controversial Jeff Bezos, could have taken the decision for mass layoffs in his own newspaper after being agreed to be the main sponsorship for the 2026 Met Gala and the Costume Art exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art? Former editor-in-chief of Vogue, current global chief content officer of Condé Nast and lead chairperson of the Met Gala, the unique and unparalleled Anna Wintour, finds now herself in an existential contradiction.

With the Anna Wintour Costume Center and Condé Nast’s galleries at the Met, Anna Wintour is establishing her eternal presence inside the Met’s walls. Because Jeff Bezos, Anna Wintour has every reason to lose her bearings. Back in 1971, Grace Mirabella succeeded to Diana Vreeland as editor-in-chief of Vogue. In 1988, Grace Mirabella knew about her dismissal from Vogue while she was watching on television the 5 o’clock news. This shows that rudeness isn’t only a childish vice and the lack of courtesy can appear at any age. The same year, Anna Wintour succeeded to Grace Mirabella as editor-in-chief of Vogue. And since February 2026, upheavals at The Washington Post got back Anna Wintour to some journalistic memories. All of this is happening while David Frankel’s movie, The Devil Wears Prada 2, originally adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s novels series in which the central character of the editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestly interpreted by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada sequel films, is supposed to be a more or less faithful interpretation of Anna Wintour during her Vogue years.

Every year, the Met Gala happens on the first Monday of May. And on Monday, May 4th, 2026, The Washington Post won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service thanks to staff writer Hannah Natanson’s politics reports, and for Feature Photography thanks to former staff photographer Jahi Chikwendiu. In the current situation of The Washington Post, there wasn’t a better way to make the Pulitzer Prize feel like a consolation prize. At the day of Monday, May 4th, 2026, the 2026 Met Gala became a historical day in the history of journalism.

Fashion journalism blurs every day the lines between the concrete and the abstract, reports and fictions, the reality and the imagination. Since the Renaissance, art and fashion are related to each other. From the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Italy and throughout other European countries, European monarchs have established the tradition of representing their reigns thanks to the creations of artists. Poets, painters, sculptors and architects worked to immortalize their own posterity and their sovereigns one. The emergence and expansion of the mercantile bourgeoisie required that bourgeois outfits be such that they could talk to the most prestigious aristocratic landowners. What is happening today, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the extreme contradiction of the traditional relationship between aristocrats, bourgeois, and artists.

Beginning with the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), 19^th-century German philosopher Hegel develops the idea of ​​the dialectical relationship between master and slave: master and slave are codependent, the slave by being the object of the master’s power and the master by being the object of the slave’s services. Question: Who are the slaves of newspapers? Answer: Social media users. Like ancient slaves, social media users don’t earn any remuneration from multinational corporations. The financial growth of American social networks led in 2021 to the creation of Meta Platforms, linking networks corporations such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Their growing wealth in the technological economy has got them introduced in the same financial category as Apple, Alphabet (Google) and Amazon. Multinational corporations have only one interest by developing social media: to advertise theirs products, like they have always done with newspapers. The Hegelian dialectic implies a reversal instant, even in the master-slave relationship. Therefore, this second question is implied with the first one: Who are the slaves of social media? Answer: Journalists. International newspapers funding depends on the condition to publish advertisements from multinational corporations. And the advertising’s efficiency is greater on social media than in newspapers. The more multinational corporations increase their investments in advertising, the less journalists will be supported at the age of social media.

Founded in 1994 by current executive chairman Jeff Bezos, Amazon has become in 2026 the main marketplace, worldwide. A whole anthology with lists of trademarks from companies, appearing on Amazon, could be written from the major part of the world’s production. This year, the economic competition for becoming the wealthiest US company is between Walmart and Amazon. Amazon’s 2025 annual revenue was $716.92 billion (+12.4% over 2024). Amazon’s next project is to break the record of the annual revenue in order to become the first, in the history of economics, to reach over $1,000 billion (based on an +11.15% annual growth rate, until 2029).

With the Costume Art exhibition, Anna Wintour is on her way to achieve the comparable mission: to integrate, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, artistic representations of the history of the world’s production. Anna Wintour embodies today the Hegelian synthesis of her Vogue years between the idealism of Diana Vreeland and the realism of Grace Mirabella. Nevertheless, the core of Anna Wintour’s dialectical synthesis remains advertisements on social media. So Anna Wintour is caught in the middle of the social media vortex. Every year, commentators talk about Met galas and all major multinational corporations have the advertising satisfaction of witnessing, along the days following Met galas, the surge of brands references for multinational corporations on social media.

Mass layoffs at The Washington Post under Jeff Bezos ownership are grounded on the current contradiction between newspapers and social media. Sacrificing the cost of journalism for the sake of free advertising, encouraged by social media users, is a major democratic issue. All world’s events, reported by writers and editors working in newspapers, cannot purely and simply disappear from the exchange of information between human beings for the only purpose of selling all the products of multinational corporations, through consumers desires, supposedly generated by advertisements. Undoubtedly, the entire economic model of the journalism needs to be deeply thought. As does the whole information system between newspapers and social media. At the age of capitalism, all business leaders have the economic responsibility for their shareholders dividends as well as their employees wages. In the history of economics and journalism, the Jeff Bezos era represents a pure contradiction of which the 2026 Met Gala was the pivotal event.

The 2026 capitalistic world has forgotten that before the publication of the cornerstone book of economics, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published a moral book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which Smith demonstrates that the essence of the existence of beings is the compassion for one another. Given the economic selfishness of multinational corporations leaders, compassion has become a completely forgotten sentiment in the 21^st-century world. Yet, Adam Smith clearly establishes compassion at the heart of the exchange of information between beings and the ability to act for the greater good of the world.

Anna Wintour (Credit, François Ilnseher)

Will Anna Wintour be the one to bring, in the age of capitalism, the resurgence of compassion? Considering the movement of contradictions in the dialectical evolution of the history of the world, nothing could be less implausible coming from the same Anna Wintour who inspired the character of Miranda Priestly for The Devil Wears Prada sequel novels & movies. As French philosopher Henri Bergson conceptualized it, in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1935), everyone already evolves in the everyday world between the intimate self and the social self: the intimate self being private truth and the social self being public truth. What will Anna Wintour’s truth reveal to herself and to the world? Will Anna Wintour’s journalistic self will disappear behind Anna Wintour’s capitalist self?

Anna Wintour’s truth was destined to come with her leadership at the organization of the Met Gala. For 2026, it’s not so surprising that the concept of costume revealed itself in Anna Wintour’s mind. Firstly, what is a costume? In the current language, we are mostly talking about clothing, garments and outfits. Since the dawn of humanity, clothing is with homing the two manners by which we protect ourselves, on any planet livable for the humankind within the infinite galaxies including the planet Earth, from geological and meteorological conditions. And like all astronauts traveling out of the planet Earth, NASA Artemis II’s astronauts (commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen) have once again taken the measure that their outfits essentially depend on the astrophysical parameters of their 2026 space mission around the Moon.

A costume is a very specific type of outfits: it represents the perfect unity between the private self and the public self. Only a mask can purely complete a costume. A costume can only be wearing at celebrations, such as the Met Gala. Originally, the first costume was the logical extension of the poet’s declamations, or the first tribal chief’s apparitions: in the history of the humankind, Zoroaster is forever the first one. Zoroaster had his powerful glory in ancient Iran. What a macabre irony during resurgence of the new war between USA and Iran, isn’t it? With The End of History and the Last Man (1992), American philosopher Francis Fukuyama sought to demonstrate that the fall of USSR signaled the end of communism and the victory of liberalism. From the world of 2026, I don’t know if a new communist revolution will happen anywhere in the future. What I’m certain is that USSR was the first and worst communist regime in the history of the humankind. At the beginning of the 21^st-century, probably it was already written that the first war in Europe came from Russia to Ukraine.

In the age of social media, Anna Wintour will forever be the greatest and the last journalist in the history of journalism. What a historical moment for Anna Wintour! Beginning her professional career as a valiant fashion journalist, and now finding herself in the course of the destiny of the world, tasked with perfecting the balance of the interdependence between economics and art. Her education, at Queen’s College in London, called Anna Wintour back to the definition of the word “art”. Etymologically, “art” comes from the Latin word “ars”: meaning ability, skill or technicality. The Costume Art exhibition contains all the elements of reflections on expressing knowledge through the act of being dressed. Reaching the know-how, as a means of how making oneself known. Which part of oneself happens publicly? And isn’t the only possible overstep for journalism, in the act of telling information, that the informed becomes the informant? Alongside the Costume Art exhibition at the Met, Jeff Bezos wears the mask of the two-headed ancient Roman god Janus. At the day of Monday, May 11th, 2026, the Costume Art exhibition becomes the universal starting point for restructuring the information in itself between economics, journalism, social media, and art.