14 Looks Someone Will Definitely Wear to the Met Gala

By next week the internet will be doing what it does best: collectively judging the Met Gala.

This year’s theme — Fashion Is Art (paired with the exhibition Costume Art) — is so groundbreaking (what is next, Art is Fashion?) that one can only hope nobody arrives dressed as a walking Mondrian, depressed Picasso or wearable Matisse cut-out.

(Me, personally, I would wear the Met Museum T-Shirt but I was not invited)

But someone definitely will. Here are our predictions:

First, naturally, Schiaparelli is the obvious answer. Because if the brief is “fashion as art,” saying Schiaparelli is almost cheating (another revolutionary insight, I know).

Look one: the gold fringe piece that looks as if a thousand paintbrushes mutinied and formed couture. Half garment, half moving sculpture, half nervous breakdown (yes, three halves).

Look two: the painted dress. Thousands of paillettes arranged like brushstrokes, almost an oil painting broken into sequins, turning the body into a walking impasto. Very modest, very daytime. Less “wearing art,” more a painting developing ambitions. And conveniently, it can now be seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art — in case one wants to inspect the brushwork before recreating it for the Met.

Look three: which frankly may be the most British thing ever produced: Stormzy’s Banksy-designed stab-proof vest from Glastonbury 2019. Fashion, but make it institutional critique. The original is now on view at the new V&A East Museum, in The Music is Black: A British Story.

Look four: a Viktor&Rolf dress that arrives already framed. Literally. Something halfway between a painting and its own museum loan. Baroque excess, gilded edges, a little absurd. For anyone tempted to interpret Fashion is Art too literally — this is how to do it with a sense of humour or simple Google/GPT chat research.

Look five: Nick Cave’s Speak Louder logic showed at Art Basel 2017. Sequinned forms dissolving into sculpture, somewhere between ritual costume, performance and something that escaped an art fair. Big plus: saving on a makeup artist. No small talk. Very practical eveningwear.

Look six: the Alexander McQueen spray-painted dress from No.13. Performance, painting and a small public breakdown together. Two industrial robots casually turning a white dress into an action painting. Before Claude!
Almost certainly someone at the Met will come in some version of this — most likely someone who discovered fashion approximately five minutes ago and thinks they’ve cracked a radical reference. But, annoyingly, solid choice.

Look seven: Givenchy by Alexander McQueen, Spring 1998 couture inspired by The Great Wave off Kanagawa. McQueen was doing Japonisme before everyone started calling everything “immersive.” One can absolutely imagine this returning at the Met — probably on someone who wants to signal they know art history, but also wants to show pilates arms.

Look eight: a less obvious choice — a Belarusian brand ZNWR and their bubble-wrap collection. Because if everyone arrives dressed as a painting, someone should come as the shipping department. If you’ve ever wanted to attend the Met as a gallerist in transit, this is your moment to shine!

Look nine: the Yves Saint Laurent Mondrian dress. But if someone turns up to this year’s Met in a literal Mondrian tribute… immediate suspicion they discovered the theme the night before the event.

Look ten: custom Riccardo Tisci. Monastic, sculptural, slightly messianic. Exactly the kind of thing that makes sense on Marina A. and almost no one else. Could someone wear it to the Met? maybe. Should anyone other than Marina? debatable. Some looks are outfits, some are artist-specific conditions. This may be the latter.

Look eleven (if we remember design is also art): Hussein Chalayan and the table-skirt from After Words. A dress, a chair, portable architecture, mild domestic surrealism. For anyone interpreting the Met theme through painting alone, a reminder that art history did, in fact, continue. Also, possibly the only look here that lets one arrive dressed as design theory.

Look twelve: the H&M x Jean-Michel Basquiat dress. We can acknowledge the Basquiat estate has been licensing too hard but, but occasionally, good things. For those wanting wearable art without foundation-level acquisition budgets. A little democratic, a little ironic. Art as (fast) fashion, courtesy of intellectual property.

Look thirteen: Loewe by Jonathan Anderson — for those who still insist on wearing art literally. Manet and Van Gogh migrating onto clothes via museum gift shop logic, elevated to luxury. Almost certainly someone will come to the Met in something like this and call it radical. The line between masterpiece and merch has become wonderfully unstable.

Look fourteen: the Yves Saint Laurent Van Gogh Iris jacket. Art is Fashion, Fashion is Art, Art is Van Gogh (for many people). Hand-embroidered by Maison Lesage with 250,000 sequins and 200,000 beads, taking around 600 hours to make