Malaysia is ostensibly linked with the Met Gala this year. At least three designers have associated themselves with the event. What a beautiful haul

Missing-man-in action:. “Where is the Malaysian designer” in this post? Screen shot: thedicksonlim/Instagram

The caption on the Instagram reel read: “First Malaysian Designer at Met Gala”. The post was shared on Sarawakian tailor Dickson Lim’s (林孝胜, Lin Xiaosheng) brand IG page, The Dickson Lim. It identified himself as that notional, not national “designer”. In that reel, Beyoncé could be seen making her way around the red carpet. Behind her trailed a small army of minders, all radiating the pretend calm of people paid to keep a skeletal Olivier Rousteing dress from doing A Night at the Museum. When we saw the post, we did not for a minute think that Mr Lim was at ‘fashion’s biggest night out’. We thought he wrote an incomplete or incorrect caption to refer to what Beyoncé was wearing. And then looking at Ty Hunter, and realising that he is not Mr Lim, we realised that it was Beyoncé’s long-time stylist who wore the said outfit. Mr Lim was not actually there. You see, in our present world of the great digital blur, you can be physically present in on a red carpet while your soul is buffering twelve time zones away, rousing to the smell of kolo mee (a Sarawakian noodle dish). The problem with soul-buffering is that by the time you finally load, the conversation has moved on, the dress has been sent back to where it came from, and the rest of us have realized we much prefer you as a thumbnail.

This is about to be insufferably pedantic, so mind the gap. Let’s look at Mr Lim’s clever use of “designer” as a noun to describe a person with a specific occupation. It implied that he, the designer, was physically there. The being was unfortunately also set up by the proposition “at”—it’s a digital ‘truth’ even if it’s a mechanical lie. There is also, interestingly, a proxy. Ty Hunter became the physical body for a designer who was only the hantu (ghost) of the night. When “Met Gala” should be doing the heavy lifting, it was the “Malaysian designer” that carried the entire narrative on his back like Jordan Roth in the Robert Wun outfit with that mannequin hinged to his shoulder blades. It’s all algorithm speak and we, like you, are navigating this digital soto (spiced soup) without a spoon. What Mr Lim wrote was essentially “optimising for visibility”, one social media manager told us. To be certain, he did declare in a later post that he “woke up [presumably in Kucing] to my designs on the front cover of The Wall Street Journal… with Beyoncé”. Again, he called out his design first. Everyone else, except Beyoncé, was rendered in low-resolution; only his seams were allowed the dignity of a sharp focus. This is truly admirable: He managed the rare feat of being both a local legend and a “Malaysia Boleh” statement. That’s no mere humble brag.

Something to do with the Met Gala. Screen shots (from left): douglaschew/Facebook, dicksonlim/Instagram, shannanferry/Instagram

Something else is sticky, too: the social friction of being the only person on that magnetic red carpet. Mr Lim’s assertion that he was (or his suit was) the “First Malaysian Designer at Met Gala” ignored other compatriots whose work has been represented at the annual event. The most recent was the mas (gold) of Malaysia Zang Toi, who, concurrently, was regaling New Yorkers with how he came to appear within the pages of Vogue. This was made possible because he loaned a gown to a journalist. In that reel, Mr Toi curiously appeared below the headshot of Anna Wintour, as if to suggest he was at the Gala with her. Mr Lim and Mr Toi weren’t the only Malaysian designers who understood the power of suggestion. There is also Douglas Chew, former designer at Loris Azzaro. In a Facebook rant, he insinuated that the Saint Laurent outfit that Hailey Bieber wore was copied from his past design: “Bitch stole my look from 1992, photographed on Ling Tan (a contemporary of Mr Chew, who was a model). It is not clear who “bitch” referred to—createur or model—but it sang with all the melodic charm of a fork hitting a garbage disposal on a Tuesday that should have stayed a Monday. He made no mention of a much earlier YSL collection: Mr Saint Laurent’s collaboration with the sculptor Claude Lalanne in 1969. Will Saint Laurent be calling their lawyers? Mr Chew, who was the ebullient program director at Raffles LaSalle College in Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai, is linked to the Met Gala too because his knock-off was worn there. All this while, as they excite themselves, Singaporean designer Grace Ling, was on that damned red carpet. At the risk of redundancy, yes, in person.

However, nothing beats the beautiful haul of suggestibility than being seen on a sterile American newspaper. Honestly, we can understand Mr Lim’s elation. An outfit on the very cover of The Wall Street Journal is validation, even if incidental. No caption identified what Beyonce accompanying stylist—a paid crew member—wore, but that is good enough for a designer whose measure of success is logistical accomplishment rather than a creative one. It looks to us to be the sartorial equivalent of the recently concluded Rain Rave in Kuala Lumpur—it’s not about the experience of the rain (which was manufactured, anyway); it’s about the image of it, the vibe, the hyper-shareability. Today’s brands are built on the frenzy of unbridled proximity, where the clout of the companion is really a three-second cameo in a VIP’s story that offers more market value than an unfiltered core or a decade of craftsmanship. It’s a real shame that the actual Met Gala attendees didn’t get to meet the “designer” Dickson Lim described in his caption; he sounded much more interesting than the man who wasn’t actually there.