The first Monday of this past May was the same as the first Monday of most of the past Mays, which is to say that it was the day that the Metropolitan Museum of Art held it’s annual Met Gala, or Met Ball. You know the one, with the Anna Wintours and the Kardashians and the famous people dressed up in clothes that correspond with a seem that may or may not be racist? Well, this latest Met Gala was themed Manus X Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology, which meant dressing like robots. Or, that’s what it should have meant. Apparently only one famous person got the memo, and it was erstwhile One Directioner, Zayn Malik.
Malik’s getup was basically a suit with a metal arm, and it was widely derided as childish and lame and maybe just a little bit stupid, like, dude took this real literally, right? But others, myself included, saw past the inanity of the thing for what it was: a blatant homage to Mortal Kombat‘s cyborg soldier, Jax, who is best pals with Sonya, the baddest chick in all of the MK universe. This was all conjecture at the time; we had no evidence that Malik was a fan of Mortal Kombat, or that he was even aware of who Jax was. Until now.
In a recent interview with Dazed magazine, Malik came clean on his inspiration, as well as the hate he received for his tacky-as-hell outfit. He said:
“It was cool. I had seen a few people hitting me online, saying negative things about it. But I enjoyed it because they were saying I looked like a dude from Mortal Kombat, and it was actually based on a character (from the video game series), called Jax. He had metal arms, and the theme was technology, so I just took it from him… It’s a bit easy to just dress up in a suit. I like to do things that are a bit outside of that.”
Sure, dressing up in a suit is easy. But, hell, so is dressing up in a suit with metal arms. You know what’s really hard? Using those arms to pound the ground with such force that a minor, very pink quake is generated, resulting in the disarming of one’s opponent, unless they were blocking low. Now that‘s difficult.