By The Editors of cohesive magazine
They did not simply arrive. They made arguments. These are the women who wore
fashion the way it was always meant to be worn: as if it mattered.
There is a version of the Met Gala where everyone shows up and the clothes are
beautiful and nothing is at stake. Monday was not that version. The theme was
Costume Art. The dress code was Fashion Is Art. And with those two directives, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art handed four hundred people an invitation to make a
case. Most of them took it. The twenty women on this list did not just take the
invitation. They rewrote the terms.
What follows is not a ranking of prettiness. It is a record of women who understood
that getting dressed, truly dressed, is an act of articulation. Some of them moved us.
Several of them stopped us cold. One of them arrived with seven attendants and a
ship on her head and shut the entire staircase down. You will know which one.
NO. 01
Madonna Custom Saint Laurent | Designer: Anthony Vaccarello | Look of the Night
Wearing: Custom Saint Laurent
Designer: Anthony Vaccarello
Inspiration: Leonora Carrington, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” 1945
Headpiece: Beaded ship, custom
Let the record show that Madonna was the last person on those stairs that anyone
will be talking about a year from now. That is not sentimentality. That is fact.
She arrived in a custom Saint Laurent gothic gown by Anthony Vaccarello, long black
satin gloves, platform booties, and yards of grey tulle that moved like weather. On
her head: a towering beaded headpiece in the shape of a haunted ship, the kind of
thing that takes a team of artisans and an unflinching sense of self to actually wear.
A sheer grey veil poured from it in every direction. She required seven attendants to
carry her train. She required nothing else.
The reference was Leonora Carrington’s 1945 oil painting, “The Temptation of St.
Anthony” — a surrealist work by the British-Mexican painter in which a feminine figure
stands crowned with a vessel, attended by a coven of helpers. Madonna has been a
fan of Carrington since before most people knew Carrington’s name. Her 1994
“Bedtime Story” video drew from the same well. This was not pastiche. This was
fluency.
Vaccarello’s interpretation gave the painting breath. The lacy gothic gown. The brass
accessories. The seven real women in attendance, recreating the painting’s
composition on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A sparkle-encrusted
bird pendant at her throat. A performance that was also a painting that was also a
woman who has spent forty years being told she was too much.
She was exactly enough.
NO.02
LISA Custom Robert Wun | 66,960 Swarovski Crystals | 2,860 Hours of Handwork
Wearing: Custom Robert Wun
Collection: AW25 Haute Couture, Look 23
Crystals: 66,960 White Swarovski
Handwork: 2,860 hours
Jewelry: Bulgari Eclettica High Jewelry Sapphire Necklace
Concept: The Bride Lifting Up Her Own Veil / Thai dance heritage
LISA came to the Met as a bride who lifts her own veil. That was the concept, stated
plainly by the house: The Bride Lifting Up Her Own Veil. Think on that. Not veiled by
another. Not unveiled by circumstance. By herself. Of her own choosing.
Wun 3D-scanned her actual arms to create the sculptural extensions that emerged
from the gown’s shoulders. The additional appendages were arranged in positions
drawn from traditional Thai dance — a quiet, precise nod to her heritage. The fully
crystallised sheer gown and veil were ivory, embroidered with 66,960 white Swarovski crystals, representing 2,860 hours of handwork. At her throat: a Bulgari
High Jewelry Sapphire necklace from the Eclettica collection.
There is a word for what she did on those stairs. The word is angelic. We do not use it lightly.
No. 03
Naomi Osaka
Custom Robert Wun | 659,000+ Stitches | 3,280+ Hours of Handwork
Wearing: Custom Robert Wun
Embroidery: 659,000+ stitches
Handwork: 3,280+ hours
Crystals: Thousands of faceted Swarovski in four shades of red
In Exhibition: “Costume Art,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This was Naomi Osaka’s first Met Gala appearance in five years. She did not ease
back in. She arrived in a dramatic sculpted ivory coat with open seams that exposed
red crystals from within, adorned with striped feathers flaring outward like a fountain.
She climbed the steps in the coat. Then she shed it.
Underneath: a fitted red crystallised gown shaded and contoured to map the human
anatomy, the back exposed through a laced-up keyhole. The gown features over
659,000 stitches of intricate embroidery, totalling more than 3,280 hours of
handiwork. A version of the dress is displayed in the “Costume Art” exhibit, in the
section highlighting art about the body in pain.
Wun designed a dress about the body in pain and Osaka, who has spent a career
navigating the public dimensions of her own, wore it without flinching. The fashion
world should remember this moment for exactly what it was.
No. 04
Beyonce
Robert Wun SS26 Runway Finale | First Met Appearance in a Decade
Wearing (inside gala): Robert Wun SS26 Runway Finale Look
Wearing (red carpet): Custom Olivier Rousteing
Beyonce made her first Met Gala appearance in a decade and she made it count
twice. On the red carpet she wore a glittering Olivier Rousteing skeleton gown with
Blue Ivy by her side, commanding an entrance that rewrote the definition of
entrance. Inside the gala, she changed into the finale look from Robert Wun’s
Spring/Summer 2026 runway.
Wun posted three words to his Instagram story when the image circulated: “And at
last.” Three words that carried the weight of everything. The veiled look, the
couturier’s closing statement from his SS26 show, on the woman who is fashion’s
closest equivalent to a co-chair of the universe. The pairing was not an accident. It
was a conclusion.
This is what it looks like when a designer and an artist meet at the height of both
their powers and decide to simply finish each other’s sentence.
No. 05
Nichapat Suphap
Custom Robert Wun x Casey Curran | Inspired by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam
Wearing: Custom Robert Wun
Kinetic Sculpture: Casey Curran
Inspiration: Michelangelo, “The Creation of Adam”
Nichapat Suphap has been attending the Met since 2018, when she became the first
Thai person to do so. Each year, she raises the stakes. This year, she brought
Michelangelo.
The black mermaid-style gown by Robert Wun was adorned with four silver
sculptural hands — moving, kinetically, literally moving — as she walked. Those
hands were the work of kinetic sculptor Casey Curran, whom Suphap enlisted after
learning the theme last November and immediately returning to the image of hands.
The Creation of Adam. The outstretched gesture. The space between fingers that
contains a world. She wore the painting. She wore the idea of the painting. She wore the question the
painting has been asking for five hundred years.
No. 06
Audrey Nuna
Robert Wun AW25 Haute Couture | Styled by Danyul Brown | 15,000 Black Swarovski
Crystals
Wearing: Robert Wun AW25 Haute Couture
Stylist: Danyul Brown
Detail: 15,000 jet-black Swarovski crystals arranged as stains
Concept: White look under UV investigation, revealing unknown stain marks from
the past
The top suggestion on Google, as of this year: “Why does Audrey Nuna dress like
that?” Here is your answer: because she can, and because she should, and because
nobody else will.
For her Met Gala debut, Nuna worked with stylist Danyul Brown, who envisioned a
white look under investigation by UV lighting — revealing unknown stain marks from
the past. The coat from Wun’s AW25 haute couture collection appeared to be
splattered violently with black pigment. The pigment is not pigment. It is 15,000
jet-black Swarovski crystals, arranged with the precision of something that looks
entirely accidental. Finished with Wun’s signature hat and matching gloves.
What Danyul Brown gave her was not an outfit. It was a premise. And Nuna wore the
premise the way she does everything: as though she had always known exactly who
she was.
No.06
Ananya Birla
Custom Robert Wun | Styled by Rhea Kapoor | Met Gala Debut
Wearing: Custom Robert Wun
Stylist: Rhea Kapoor
Mask: Subodh Gupta, stainless steel
Occasion: Met Gala Debut
For her first Met Gala, Ananya Birla and her stylist Rhea Kapoor elected to do
something unexpected with a Wun commission: they treated workwear as sculpture.
The result was a custom double composition — a sharp blue shirt and a sculptural
peplum jacket that cinched the waist with authority, meeting an exaggerated, lustrous
black skirt that ballooned dramatically underneath, disrupting everything the top half
had established.
At her face: a menacing stainless-steel mask by artist Subodh Gupta. Not
decorative. Confrontational. The kind of accessory that turns a look into a position.
Kapoor styled Birla as a question. Robert Wun built the architecture of the question.
Subodh Gupta put a face on it. The result was one of the most genuinely interesting
debuts the Met steps have seen in years.
No. 08
Rihanna
Maison Margiela Couture | Creative Director: John Galliano
Wearing: Maison Margiela Couture
Creative Director: John Galliano
Rihanna is always the last to arrive. This is not accident. This is power. When she
finally ascended those steps in Maison Margiela couture, shimmering in a way that
suggested light had been waiting specifically for her, the carpet exhaled.
John Galliano has made a habit of dressing her at moments that matter, and this was
a moment that mattered. The Margiela couture shimmered. She moved through it.
She always moves through it. That is the thing about Rihanna — the clothes are
extraordinary, and she is still the point.
No. 09
Hunter Schafer
Custom Prada | Inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Mada Primavesi, 1912/1913
Wearing: Custom Prada
Inspiration: Gustav Klimt, “Mada Primavesi,” 1912/1913
Gustav Klimt painted Mada Primavesi between 1912 and 1913. She was nine years
old. She stands in a white floral dress, confrontational and unconcerned, wearing the
confidence of someone who has not yet been told she should not. Hunter Schafer
wore that painting.
Custom Prada, and every ounce of the painting’s defiant ease. The floral
construction, the Klimt references embedded in the fabric, the particular way Schafer
inhabited it — as if she had been standing in that dress for a hundred years and had
simply brought it to the steps to show us. One of the most precise executions of the
theme on the entire carpet.
No. 10
Lena Dunham
Valentino | Inspired by Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes
Wearing: Valentino
Inspiration: Artemisia Gentileschi, “Judith Slaying Holofernes”
She told Ashley Graham on the livestream that she had come dressed as “the blood
spatter as Judith cuts the neck off a man.” She said it with complete composure. She
meant it completely.
The Valentino dress transforms the blood spray from Artemisia Gentileschi’s
17th-century masterpiece into a vibrant red gown. Gentileschi was one of the only
women painting professionally in the Renaissance — her work depicted female
violence and power with a directness her male contemporaries never matched.
Dunham wore her homage and then explained it on camera without flinching. The
whole thing was an act of art history education disguised as a red carpet moment.
No. 11
Emma Chamberlain
Hand-Painted Custom Mugler | Impressionist Period Reference
Wearing: Custom Mugler
Technique: Hand-painted
Reference: Impressionism
Role: Vogue Red Carpet Correspondent
Emma Chamberlain takes cues from the Impressionist period — a hand-painted
custom Mugler gown that flows into deep watery blues. Of all the nights to wear a
dress that looks like paint dissolving into water, this was the right one.
She is also Vogue’s own red carpet correspondent, and the best personal style of the
entire 2026 Met Gala may well belong to the woman who spent the evening asking
other people about theirs. The irony is exquisite. The gown is better. Mugler, the
house that has always understood the body as a canvas, handed her something that
moved like the Seine in the afternoon light. She wore it like she was born knowing
what Monet was trying to say.
No. 12
Doechii
Marc Jacobs | Cascading Headpiece | Bare Feet
Wearing: Marc Jacobs
Headpiece: Marc Jacobs, custom
Shoes: None. Bare feet. Because she chose to.
She arrived in a skin-baring plum Marc Jacobs mini-dress with a cascading
headpiece. She arrived without shoes. She is a Grammy-winning artist and she
walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in bare feet, and the whole
carpet bent slightly toward her without quite knowing why.
Doechii operates on a frequency where the rules apply and she simply chooses
which ones. The headpiece was sculptural and deliberate. The bare feet were not an
oversight. Nothing about Doechii is an oversight. The absence of shoes was its own
statement — the kind of statement that requires extreme confidence or extreme
artistry, and in her case appears to require both simultaneously.
No. 13
Gwendoline Christie
Giles Deacon Gown | Mask by Gillian Wearing | Headpiece by Stephen Jones
Wearing: Giles Deacon
Mask: Gillian Wearing, cast of Christie’s own face
Headpiece: Stephen Jones — eruption of ostrich and pheasant feathers
She had everyone seeing double. Christie’s gown, designed by her longtime partner
Giles Deacon, was layered in four shades of red: chiffon, satin, organza, and tulle.
Stephen Jones, who co-designed the headpiece with Deacon, described it as an
eruption of ostrich and pheasant feathers dyed to match. All of this is notable. The
mask is why she is on this list.
The mask was made by British artist Gillian Wearing. It is a precise cast of
Gwendoline Christie’s own face. She wore her own face as an accessory. At the Met
Gala, on a night themed around art and the body, she brought a replica of herself
and let it attend. Art about identity wearing art about the body, on the body, at an
event about art. The levels are dizzying and entirely intentional.
No. 14
Angela Bassett
Prabal Gurung | Hot Pink | Matching Makeup
Wearing: Prabal Gurung
Colour: Hot pink
The carpet needed color. Angela Bassett supplied it. Her hot pink Prabal Gurung
gown, with matching makeup that matched the gown that matched the energy she
has been deploying on red carpets since before some of these designers were born,
gave the entire evening a shot of something it did not know it was missing.
Angela Bassett does not try. She arrives. There is a distinction. The distinction is
visible in the photographs. The dress is magnificent. The woman inside it is the point.
No. 15
Ayo Edebiri
Chanel | White | Aquazzura
Wearing: Chanel
Shoes: Aquazzura
On a night of extraordinary maximalism, Ayo Edebiri in white Chanel was the quiet
interruption that proved restraint is its own form of statement. She looked positively
ethereal — a word we use rarely and mean here precisely.
She is one of the most interesting people working in entertainment, and she dressed
like it: with care, without performance, with a clarity of vision that white Chanel and
Aquazzura heels delivered cleanly. Some looks stop the carpet through excess. This
one stopped it by asking nothing of you but attention.
No. 16
Chase Sui Wonders
Alexander McQueen | Styled by Thomas Carter Phillips | Ancient Rome Reference
Wearing: Alexander McQueen
Stylist: Thomas Carter Phillips
Shoes: Amina Muaddi
Jewelry: Tiffany & Co.
Inspiration: Ancient Rome
A sculptural Alexander McQueen confection — the only proper word for it — that
Wonders described as a nod to ancient Rome. This is graceful and powerful, and a
gown we could gaze at for a considerable amount of time. Styled by Thomas Carter
Phillips and paired with Amina Muaddi shoes and Tiffany and Co. jewelry, the look is
one of those rare red carpet moments that appears effortless and is clearly the result
of extraordinary effort.
Chase Sui Wonders has been quietly becoming one of the most interesting red
carpet presences of her generation. On Monday, it became impossible to be quiet
about it.
No. 17
Sabrina Carpenter
Custom Christian Dior | Film Strip Embellishment | Sabrina, 1954
Wearing: Custom Christian Dior
Reference: “Sabrina” (1954 film) starring Audrey Hepburn
Detail: Rhinestone film strips
Fresh from a Coachella headlining act themed around Old Hollywood, Sabrina
Carpenter brought “SabrinaWood” to New York — wrapped in film strips, no less. Her
custom Dior slit tulle dress is adorned with rhinestone glimpses of the 1954 rom-com
drama Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden.
Not just any film. Her namesake. She wore a movie about herself that exists sixty
years before she did, and somehow this felt inevitable.
As host committee member she had an obligation to show up. She showed up as
cinema. That is the difference between attending the Met and understanding it.
No. 18
Amy Sherald
Thom Browne | Re-creation of Her Own 2013 Painting
Wearing: Thom Browne
Inspiration: Her own 2013 painting, “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)”
In one of the most memorable moves ever made at a Met Gala, Amy Sherald arrived
wearing a re-creation of her own painting, “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed
Deliverance)” — her 2013 work that also appeared on the cover of a March 2025
issue of The New Yorker. She wore herself. She wore her own creation. She stepped
inside her art and brought it to the steps of the institution that holds art.
Thom Browne built it. Amy Sherald wore it. The Met got to host the artist and her
painting simultaneously. There is no higher interpretation of the theme “Fashion Is
Art” than an artist wearing art that she made. That is not a stunt. That is a thesis.
No. 19
Misty Copeland
Studied Restraint | Cocoa Tulle and Leather Crop Top
Look: Cocoa tulle skirt and leather crop top
Aesthetic: Studied restraint
Every great best-dressed list requires the one look that wins by doing less. Misty
Copeland’s cocoa-hued tulle skirt and leather crop top is that look. Understated is the
word. It is also insufficient.
Copeland is a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre. She has spent her
entire career being precise with her body, understanding that the body is the
instrument and the instrument must be treated with care and exactness. She brought
that understanding to the carpet. The look is quiet. It is also exceptionally correct. On
a night when many people tried very hard, correctness was its own form of daring.
No. 20
Nicole Kidman Chanel | 2026 Met Co-Chair | With Daughter Sunday Rose in Dior
Wearing: Chanel
Role: 2026 Met Gala Co-Chair
Sunday Rose Kidman Urban: Christian Dior
Nicole Kidman arrived as co-chair in Chanel, all volume and texture, attended by her
daughter Sunday Rose Kidman Urban in Dior. Two houses. Two generations. One
entrance. It was elegant and it was deliberate and it was the kind of image that gets
printed on a mood board for the next decade.
She has been wearing fashion as a language for thirty years. Chanel is not a
surprising choice for her. Nothing she does is surprising. Everything she does is
correct. There is a version of fashion mastery that looks like discovery, and there is a
version that looks like fluency. Nicole Kidman is fluency. She has never had to
discover it. She simply knows.
She co-chaired the night. She dressed for it. She left looking like the co-chair of
something larger than an event. She is.
