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Anti-Jeff Bezos/Amazon/Met Gala protests got off early Tuesday in Manhattan with ... what else? A fashion show.

Labor is Art, a group bringing together Amazon workers, their unions and supporters, staged a show on Little West 12th Street to emphasize that labor workers have the power to tell their own stories, and it is their labor that makes Amazon – and not the man who owns 8% of it.

As the Met Gala enters its billionaire era – tonight’s bash is supported to the tune of $10m by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, according to the New York Post – many said they were concerned that Bezos, the Met Gala and the fashion industry broadly, were bigfooting. The city was filled with purring Black SUVs ferrying gala guests around from pre-event to pre-event.

Alexia Sol, who walked in the show wearing Cindy Cruz, said she was protesting because “billionaires are not the most important people in the world. The most important are the people, and when the people work for billionaires they’re just making them more money.”

“The Met Gala is not celebrating humans, it’s celebrating only money,” Sol, a trans activist, said.

Samari Jumar, 37, a Puerto Rican model and Amazon warehouse employee, said her work at Amazon was “very manual, a heavy lift, and by the end of the day, very painful”.

The retail giant did provide bathrooms, she said, undercutting claims by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK campaign group that had reportedly dropped 500 small bottles of urine, each bearing a picture of Bezos, around the Metropolitan Museum of Art ahead of the gala.

“The Met Museum is taking the PISS by having Jeff honored as their Gala host,” the group said in an Instagram post. The group was out on Sunday night, projecting slogans on Bezos’ Madison Square apartment building.

Jumar, wearing a nude fashion outfit by Cindy Castro, said it was important to Amazon warehouse workers to be visible, as she said, “the people behind the smile” and “to show the world they would stand up for our rights.”

As an arts major and a lover of fashion, she said, she wanted a ball without billionaires. “I feel that wealth can give you power but it won’t make you worthy. I feel like they want to rewrite what culture is and we won’t permit them to narrate to us what culture is.”

Shantiera Dubarry, a New York City government security guard, was sitting backstage between a rehearsal and the main show. She said her main problem with Bezos, his wife and others was that “they had built a great workspace for themselves on other people’s backs.”

“The attention should go more on the people that helped them get all this wealth and publicity,” Dubarry said. “They should put the workers hard work in the spotlight. They seem to want to grab everything for themselves.”

But Dubarry, wearing a dress by Mel Corchado, said she wouldn’t want to protest the Met Gala itself. “This is my protest. I offer peace and love and if they see it, even if they don’t speak on it, I think it offers volumes. I would never want to go curse and yell at people.”

Of course the Work is Art fashion show was itself piggybacking on the Met Gala, which will showcase celebrities and designers in wildly exaggerated fashions. But as with the Black dandy theme last year, it’s often the people celebrating, or protesting, on the outside who do with more appealing verve and spontaneity.

Giselle Lebedenko and her designer friend Chris Mejia were sitting waiting for the show to begin. Who are you wearing? “Ourselves!” they said back in unison. Lebedenko came as a glammed-up milkmaid and Mejia as a kind of camp medieval minstrel.

Their looks brought to a focus a fundamental problem for the fashion industry – that its grip on younger fashion fans is weakening, in part because it has become impossibly expensive. So fans are relegated to onlookers – or to the booming vintage market.

Jeff and Lauren Bezos are in a sense only symbolic of a larger disconnection between fashion brands and fashion fans. “They’re just creating too much stuff,” said Lebedenko. Mejia nodded in agreement.

“They just producing things to make money and not looking at what our generation actually values,” he said. “We’re very self-expressive, we want to dress up and wear color. But they’re anti-personality and want to mute us down. They’re trying to sell us product without any character.”

They, too, said billionaires were trying to invade the cultural space that they were not will to secede. “Fashion is an art and I think it should be more of celebration of the people doing the hard work,” Mejia said. “Because of overconsumption and fast fashion, the billionaires see it as a way to profit and cash-grab and it ends up hurting the hard work that has gone into it.”