If the 2026 Met Gala red carpet felt dominated by naked dresses and Grecian draping, a few other attendees chose to embrace the “Fashion Is Art” dress code with a sense of the uncanny—the weird, the eerie, the masked-up, and the many-limbed.
Raised nipples and body-contouring bodices were on full display on the likes of Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber, but others chose to give body-ody-ody in more subversive ways. French pop star and model Yseult, for one, opted for a fluid, tuxedo-style dress by Harris Reed, complete with a gilded, golden corset and hand-beaded belly button.
“Yseult was very keen to explore the idea of her body as the centerpiece,” explains Reed, “and we worked on various ideas that really cast her as the art piece: like a statue draped in fabric, displaying her and her body in all her magnificence.” Both Yseult and Reed found kinship in their allegiance to a bit of drama, so they upped the ante with a halo-effect headpiece. Her glam was equally captivating, featuring asymmetric eyelashes and colorful melting shadow.
Jewelry designer Sabine Getty was a first-time Met Gala attendee. Still, she felt supported on the red carpet—both figuratively and literally, as she was wearing a sheer nude illusion gown by Ashi Studio, with painted hands tracing her waist and breasts.
Masks were also embraced by many. Gwendoline Christie appeared wearing a scarlet tulle dress by Giles Deacon with a multicolored feathered headpiece by milliner Stephen Jones, and brandishing a mask by the British Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing. The flush-cheeked and crimson-lipped mask matched her own visage (which was painted by Pat McGrath). It was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s luxuriously textured portraits and Madame Yevonde’s 1938 photograph Mask (Rosemary Chance)—the latter of which interrogates themes of dual selves and vanity.
Then there was one-time Blue Origin NS-31 space cadet Katy Perry, who covered her face with a mirrored, astronaut-like Miodrag Guberinic mask matched to her custom Stella McCartney white gown. Her gloves featured a sixth finger—poking fun at a common mistake A.I. makes when generating images of people—and she pulled tarot cards on the carpet. A lot going on there.
Ananya Birla also opted for metallic, wearing an elaborate face mask by Subodh Gupta that sharply contrasted with her sculptural bodice and full skirt.
Elsewhere, instead of legs for days, we got arms. Seven-time attendee Jordan Roth got to bring a friend in the form of a 3D-printed sculpture embracing him from behind, with a gray Robert Wun gown that made him into a living sculpture. Statuesque figures were aplenty at the Met, but Roth wanted to push the notion of the classical human rendering a bit further. “A solo figure is often posing for the viewer, but multiple figures are usually in some kind of heated moment—romance, love, lust, fear, violence. Something passionate is going on among these bodies,” Roth shared with Vogue. “And my curiosity was, what would it be like to be a body in that sculpture, to live in that sculpture?”
