Fashion Is Art
The Met Gala embodied what couture was meant to be
This year’s theme, Fashion Is Art, could have easily become another parade of safe archival gowns and vague museum-inspired references. Instead, a few looks genuinely did it right: not just wearing beautiful clothes, but wearing concepts, narratives, and creative worlds.
Here are the ones that stayed with me long after the carpet ended.
Emma Chamberlain — becoming the canvas itself
Emma Chamberlain’s Mugler look felt less like a dress and more like a painting that had somehow learned to move.
What made it interesting wasn’t only the obvious Van Gogh-esque brushstroke effect. The gown was reportedly hand-painted over 40 hours and inspired by Emma’s childhood growing up around her father’s watercolor and oil paintings.
Louisa Jacobson — Joan of Arc reimagined through couture
Louisa Jacobson (Meryl Streep’s daughter) understood the assignment. Her look leaned into one of history’s most mythologized female figures, the warrior saint immortalized for centuries through paintings, tapestries, and sculpture: Joan of Arc.
The metallic detailing and structured silhouette captured the tension of femininity versus strength, sanctity versus rebellion.
This is my fav one!
Mona Patel — the Leonardo da Vinci fantasy
Dolce & Gabbana conceived Mona Patel’s look as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci.
The outer cape resembled a floating manuscript covered in sketches, notes, and references to the Vitruvian Man. Underneath, the gown explored anatomy through pleated chiffon mimicking muscles and fascia.
Leonardo studied bodies the same way couturiers study silhouettes.
Both are obsessed with structure, movement, proportion, illusion.
That’s why couture can feel almost architectural at its best.
Eileen Gu — the future of couture
Eileen Gu’s Iris van Herpen look may have been the clearest example of fashion becoming actual installation art.
The dress reportedly contained over 15,000 glass bubbles and required more than 2,500 hours of craftsmanship, but the truly surreal detail was the hidden technology embedded underneath that produced floating bubbles around her body as she moved.
It felt like contemporary immersive art: part sculpture, part science experiment, part dream sequence.
Hailey Bieber — the color that makes history
Hailey Bieber arrived in a custom Saint Laurent dress.
The solid 24-karat gold breastplate was reportedly moulded directly from her own body, referencing Yves Saint Laurent’s 1969 collaboration with sculptor Claude Lalanne, who pioneered these surreal metallic torso pieces decades ago.
But the blue is what stays with you. Jacques Majorelle, the French Orientalist painter, developed that specific shade in 1937, using it to paint his villa in Marrakech, a colour so vivid it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Yves Saint Laurent later purchased and restored that villa, incorporating what became known as Majorelle blue into his own collections.
Rachel Zegler — the blindfold that was never decorative
Rachel Zegler wore a Prabal Gurung design finished with a delicate strip of gauze across her eyes. The look was inspired by Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, which depicts the sixteen-year-old queen being guided toward the block after ruling England for nine days before Mary I claimed the throne.
Alex Consani — Botticelli’s garden, remade
Alex Consani made history as the first trans woman to co-chair the Met Gala. She hit the carpet in a Gucci gown and white faille cape by Demna, reportedly inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera. Then, in a dramatic moment, she removed the cape to reveal a sheer nude bustier paired with a skirt and train covered in black feathers.
Obsessed with her hair style.
Gracie Abrams — a Klimt in motion
Gracie Abrams wore a gold Chanel gown directly inspired by Gustav Klimt’s gold-leaf period — The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. His figures are barely distinguishable from their backgrounds; the decorative and the human collapse into each other.
Klimt’s women aren’t dated because they were never entirely in time. They exist in that golden suspension where beauty tips into myth.
Fashion is art when it carries a reference beyond itself, when it means something to the person wearing it, and something again to the person looking.
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