Met Gala guests from Vogue red carpet correspondent Emma Chamberlain to professional tennis player Naomi Osaka did not play it safe this year for the Met Gala, delivering custom works of art in honor of the dress code “Fashion is art.”
Osaka stunned as she left The Mark Hotel for the Gala in a dramatic Robert Wun white sculptural fitted dress with exaggerated shoulders and adorned with red feathers and a matching headpiece. To complete her dramatic look, Osaka’s hands were dipped in dripping red paint. A similar look by Wun sits inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit, “Costume Art.”
On the Met steps, Osaka opened her dress and removed her headpiece for a grand reveal underneath. She wowed in a sleek red beaded gown embellished with the form of a body.
Chamberlain arrived in a breathtaking Mugler by Miguel Castro Freitas hand-painted dress. The star was dipped in a rainbow of colors from her décolletage down to the spiral train of her body-hugging dress with fringe falling down the cuffs of the long-sleeve gown.
With all the fanfare around the “The Devil Wears Prada 2”, Met Gala Co-chair Anna Wintour opted for a cool mint ensemble — not the trendy cerulean blue from the first film. Wintour’s look featured a feathered cape and a beaded dress by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel that she classically paired with her signature bob and oversized sunglasses.
Other co-chairs of the evening Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams chose more subdued looks. Williams wore a sparkling black off-the-shoulder gown with a dazzling bejeweled neckpiece in homage to a painting of herself done by Robert Pruitt for the National Portrait Gallery. Event sponsor Lauren Sánchez Bezos arrived in a form-fitting Schiaparelli gown, which she told Vogue was influenced by John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting “Madame X.”
Some guests took the theme to another level, taking hours to transform into works of art. TikTok followers watched along as Jessica Kayll, who designs colorful silk robes, finished painting her dress in the days leading up to the gala. Kayll painted her own take on the famous Monet water lily scene right on top her dress for the gala.
When guests were not wearing art, they were making references to it. Head of Editorial Content for US Vogue Chloe Malle wore an apricot orange Colleen Allen dress inspired by Sir Frederic Leighton’s “Flaming June” painting. Actor and author Lena Dunham collaborated with Valentino designer Alessandro Michele for her red feathered dress to depict his interpretation of “Judith Slaying Holofernes.” As a child, Dunham told Vogue, she would visit the Met museum on Sundays and admire the paintings in the renaissance section.
“One of my favorite painters from that era is Artemisia Gentileschi, who was one of the only women painting professionally in that moment,” she told Vogue. “So I sent some of the images to Alessandro, and because he’s a genius instead of dressing me like her, he said, ‘You are actually the blood spatter as … Judith cuts the neck off a man.’”
Stars also celebrated the dress code with their accessories. Actor and fashion muse Gwendoline Christie playfully covered her face on the carpet with a mask of her own face while pop star Katy Perry opened and closed her fencing-like mask on the carpet to smile at the cameras.
Unlike last year’s blue carpet, this year’s carpet appeared intentionally forgotten by time with grass creeping up the steps. The carpet featured patches of overgrown grass peeking out from the stone steps with manicured shrubs lining the side railing and white wisteria dangling from the roof. Potted purple flowers stood at the entrance of the carpet in large terra-cotta planters.
Past Gala dress codes have honored designers and pulled from literature. Last year, the art of tailoring was center stage with the dress code “Tailored for you.” The high-profile event raises money for the Met’s Costume Institute, and each year the dress code for the gala takes cues from the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition.
On display this Spring, the “Costume Art” exhibit will “examine the centrality of the dressed body.”
The relationship between fashion and art has not always been embraced. Art historian and author Nancy Hall-Duncan writes in her book, “Art X Fashion: Fashion Inspired by Art” that in the 19th century, art was perceived as classical and fashion was frivolous.
When Yves Saint Laurent held the Met’s first fashion exhibit in 1983, the exhibit was met with heavy criticism. Since then, the museum has held countless fashion exhibits throughout the years with museums around the world following suit. The Louvre put on its first fashion exhibition “Louvre couture” last year.
The dress code set by Wintour and the Met’s Costume Institute curator, Andrew Bolton, is the final seal of approval that fashion is art, Hall-Duncan told The Associated Press.
“Isn’t that a giant step?” she said. “It will indeed change perceptions.”
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