The Met Gala’s dress code always encourages interpretation, but this year it practically begged for it.
While inside the museum the “Costume Art” exhibition offered a thoughtful, almost academic meditation on the dressed body in art across the centuries, on the steps the Fashion Is Art–themed red carpet presented something else entirely: a prompt, even a dare, to get a little literal. Some guests nodded politely to the theme. Others showed up ready to hang.
If the exhibition is about ideas, the fashion was about references: big, bold, occasionally delightfully on-the-nose ones. While Gracie Abrams shimmered straight out of Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Rachel Zegler delivered full historical drama by way of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Madonna didn’t just reference Leonora Carrington, she channeled her—entourage and all—and Heidi Klum went all in on The Veiled Virgin. And then there was the night’s most unexpected trio: three separate takes on Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, courtesy of Claire Foy, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and Julianne Moore—proof that even one scandalous strap can have a long afterlife.
Here, a tour through the looks that didn’t just nail the assignment—they practically cited their sources.
Cardi B arrived as a Surrealist fever dream courtesy of Marc Jacobs, with her body reworked into the uncanny proportions of Hans Bellmer. Bellmer, a 1930s provocateur, is best known for his disturbing, meticulously staged photographs of dolls—limbs rearranged, torsos doubled, bodies fragmented into something both hyperfeminine and deeply unsettling. Jacobs pulled directly from that visual language, exaggerating Cardi’s hips, shoulders, and silhouette into something sculptural and slightly off-kilter.
Gracie Abrams leaned all the way into Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, better known as “The Woman in Gold,” one of the most famous—and contested—portraits of the 20th century. Her custom Chanel gown echoed the painting’s signature gold-leaf surface, built from dense, mosaic-like embroidery that reads almost like armor up close.
Rachel Zegler went straight to high drama in Prabal Gurung, channeling The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. The painting captures the final moments before the teenage queen’s execution, her blindfold symbolizing both her innocence and her complete vulnerability; she quite literally cannot see what’s coming. Zegler translated that into a stark, off-the-shoulder white gown, letting the blindfold do the emotional heavy lifting.
Claire Foy’s Erdem look riffed on Portrait of Madame X—the 1884 portrait that caused a scandal thanks to a (then) shockingly suggestive slipped strap. Sargent famously repainted it, restoring the strap to the shoulder, but the tension never quite went away. Foy emphasized that push and pull, wearing a slinky black satin gown offset with a crystal-embroidered Barbour jacket that made the whole thing feel slightly undone.
Lauren Sánchez Bezos, meanwhile, went straight for the original controversy: Her custom Schiaparelli gown leaned into the version of Sargent’s painting that first shocked Paris with that small, slipping detail.
Julianne Moore offered the most subtle take on Portrait of Madame X of the night. In custom Bottega Veneta, she let her shoulder strap fall only slightly—a quiet nod to the detail that caused such a stir in 1884. In a way, her approach rhymed with the very legacy of Sargent’s portrait: What’s helped it endure is not what’s shown but suggested.
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Amy Sherald took the assignment at face value—and then flipped it. Wearing a custom Thom Browne look based on her own painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), she arrived at The Met as both artist and artwork. (Other visual artists invited to the gala this year included Tschabalala Self, Anna Weyant, and Maya Lin.) The polka dots, the crisp graphic lines, the unmistakable palette—it all tracked back to Sherald’s highly distinctive style.
Hunter Schafer’s Prada look nodded to Mäda Primavesi, Klimt’s curious 1912 portrait of a Viennese child. Unlike the artist’s gilded society portraits, this one is airy and a little offbeat—Mäda is set, wide-eyed, against a scatter of color and pattern—and Schafer’s soft, whimsical florals nodded to that sensibility.
Kim Kardashian’s look pointed directly to Allen Jones’s Body Armour (2013)—a sculptural series modeled on Kate Moss in which the female form is rendered as a sleek, high-gloss shell. The piece sits somewhere between clothing and sculpture, turning the body into a polished surface rather than a soft, natural one. Kardashian’s breastplate picked up on that idea, exaggerating the torso into something almost industrial in its perfection. It’s less about dressing the body than recasting it.
Naomi Watts’s custom Dior gown, designed by Jonathan Anderson, referred to the house’s 1951 Tableau Final couture look, originally rendered in a light palette with soft pink florals. Here, the same sculptural blooms are set against a deep black ground, the colors sharpened into something more saturated and deliberate. The shift made the dress feel less garden party, more still-life painting.
Currently on Broadway in The Rocky Horror Show, Luke Evans brought a bit of that theatrical confidence to the carpet, stepping into the world of Tom of Finland in a custom Palomo Spain leather-daddy look. Tom of Finland—born Touko Laaksonen—became famous for his drawings of hypermasculine uniformed men in leather and caps that blurred the line between authority and fantasy. Evans’s look picked up on that visual language.
Alexa Chung’s custom Dior gown, designed by Jonathan Anderson, took its cue from Water Lilies—but in a distilled, almost single-note way. The dress homed in on one blooming lily against a fluid chartreuse ground, transforming Monet’s Impressionistic scene into something more graphic and controlled. There was still a sense of softness and atmosphere but sharpened just enough to read cleanly on the carpet.
Lisa Airan pulled from Christopher Kane’s spring 2015 collection, which riffed on The Dance by Henri Matisse. Her dress picked up the painting’s saturated colors and sense of movement, its figures winding playfully about the body.
Madonna went full dark enchantress in Saint Laurent, drawing from Leonora Carrington—the 20th-century painter and writer whose work in the 1940s conjured dreamlike worlds filled with witches, hybrids, and ritual-like scenes. Carrington’s paintings don’t focus on a single figure so much as on an entire cast of characters, and Madonna understood that: Her sheer violet cape, carried by a small procession of women, created a sprawling and evocative tableau.
Kendall Jenner quite literally earned her wings on Monday, channeling Winged Victory of Samothrace—the second-century BCE marble statue that greets you at the top of the staircase leading out of the Louvre’s Denon Wing. Zac Posen translated its windswept drapery into a liquid, almost wet-looking jersey that clung and moved in all the right places.
Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo doubled down on drama in a Jean Paul Gaultier gown also inspired by Winged Victory of Samothrace. From the pleats to the volume, the look was a sculptural wonder.
Ben Platt, the Tony-winning actor and singer, opted for a custom hand-painted and embroidered Tanner Fletcher suit on Monday night—simultaneously nodding to the night’s theme and a canonical piece of musical theater. His look referenced A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) by Georges Seurat—the work that inspired Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park With George—with scattered, almost pointillist detailing across the fabric.
Miles Chamley-Watson’s custom suit, helmet, and foil by KidSuper riffed on the fractured geometries of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, with its raucous color palette and rigorous tailoring adding up to the most exuberant kind of dissonance.
No one commits to a theme quite like Heidi Klum, who showed up to The Met on Monday in a custom Mike Marino look inspired by The Veiled Virgin. The original 19th-century bust is famous for its astonishing level of detail, and Klum’s version leaned right into that idea, wrapping her face and body in layers that looked almost unreal. The result was part Renaissance sculpture, part Halloween (in the best, most Heidi way).
Audrey Nuna’s Robert Wun coat dress looked like it had been through something—and in fact, it was splattered with 15,000 black crystals arranged like especially stubborn stains. The overall look read very Jackson Pollock—specifically, his drip-period canvases from the late 1940s.
Rosé kept things sleek, but the reference ran deep. Working with Saint Laurent, she adapted a motif from Georges Braque’s The Birds that had appeared across multiple Yves Saint Laurent collections, alighting on an archival reference that felt perfectly modern.
For her big Fashion Is Art moment, Alexi Ashe Meyers wore a spring 2017 Celine dress featuring bold, blue body prints after Yves Klein. Klein is best known for his Anthropometries performances from the 1960s, in which he used paint-covered female bodies as living brushes, pressing them onto canvas to create those unmistakable silhouettes in his signature International Klein Blue. Meyers’s dress translated that idea directly, making it both one of the most literal interpretations of the night—and one of the smartest.
In Prabal Gurung, Angela Bassett sweetly alluded to Girl in Pink Dress by Laura Wheeler Waring, whose portraits of Black women during the Harlem Renaissance are all about poise without performance.
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