The British Museum’s answer to the Met Gala is just what London needs

The glamorous fundraiser has long been a linchpin in the New York social calendar. Joy Lo Dico – who knows what’s what when it comes to society parties – explains how the museum’s first ball will do wonders

News of London’s latest attempt to rival New York’s Met Gala by hosting the British Museum’s inaugural fundraising ball later this month has brought back fond memories of my previous life as a London party queen.

When I was the editor of the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary, I wasn’t short of invites to such functions. The Serpentine Gallery’s summer parties were particularly good – Pharrell Williams gave an impromptu performance one year – as were those at the V&A, where I’d find myself drinking champagne around the oval pool in the John Madejski garden with winners of Nobel Prizes in Literature. Frieze Art Fair and its attendant parties made for excellent people-watching, as gallery owners like Jay Jopling courted corporate suits who had the necessary readies to fund such creativity.

And that’s before we’ve even factored in moments like Kylie singing while lying across the bar at The Ivy, or Lady Gaga’s private gigs at Annabel’s, because guest lists show the true extent of power and display who’s who and what’s what in a certain year. The British Museum’s ball, with museum director Nicholas Cullinan playing the role of Anna Wintour, is set to host the great and the good of culture – think Dame Kristin Scott Thomas for film, Tracey Emin for art, and Roksanda Ilincic for fashion, and those who support its work.

The British Museum’s director Nicholas Cullinan takes on Anna Wintour’s key role as architect of the guestlist (Gareth Cattermole/Getty)

This inaugural ball’s theme is pink – not a reference to Barbie, Cullinan has been keen to stress, but a nod to the colours and light of India in the museum’s exhibition, Ancient India: Living Traditions, which closes the day after the ball. Guests will be encouraged to dress in appropriate tones (the correct pink, apparently, has a touch of purple to it), and even the champagne will be rosé.

Whatever New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art can do, the British Museum will do better. You want a vast staircase for arrival photos? You’ve got it. And they will be encouraged to open their wallets: a silent auction will run through dinner, with any profit going to fund international projects, including the Bayeux Tapestry loan, and research projects at Girsu in Iraq, one of the world’s earliest known civilisations.

But to make a gala legendary needs more than just good frocks, a stream of photos coming through on Instagram, or a theme. To stake its claim on the cultural calendar, it needs to be talked about, scorned, columnised – and become the envy of those who don’t get invited.

Where the British Museum’s party becomes complicated is that it is taking place, well, there. The British Museum is both the repository for our global cultural history and the punching bag for national guilt over our colonial past. These days, the Benin bronzes and Elgin marbles are probably more talked about than viewed. One can’t even borrow the Bayeux Tapestry without an accompanying hoo-ha – even though, technically speaking, the Normans colonised us.

Then there’s the matter of such a display of excess in what are indubitably lean times. Lavish gowns and the pop of flashbulbs will sit uncomfortably next to news reports about grim developments in tax rises and immigration. Is there just a touch of the Marie Antoinettes about it? (Although, to be fair, that exhibition is doing great guns at the V&A.)

Claims of cultural clout can look a bit hollow when it comes to pricing. Tickets cost £2,000 a seat, or £20,000 for a table of ten, meaning £1.6m for the museum before costs. However, a single ticket to the Met Gala will cost $75,000 or £55,000 – usually a brand pays to host a table, and the celebrity swans in as their guest – and unless you happen to encounter a celeb who’s overdone the surgery, there you don’t even get to sit next to a mummy.

The well-to-do will certainly angle for an invite, and if the British Museum doesn’t feel guilt on other matters, then perhaps it doesn’t feel any remorse for charging through the nose. Those exhibits don’t polish themselves, you know.

But then this ball does also show off an admirable confidence that London is still swinging through, despite the adverse forces in motion around it. The capital needs a good party. At a time when Britain is fretting about decline, a glittering, outrageous party is a statement of vitality: that the capital still swings. It is the champagne and social fluidity that will lead us out of the darkness.