Cardi B! Bad Bunny! Doja Cat! All the stars came out for last night’s Met Ball. The dress code was “The Garden of Time,” and there sure were a lot of florals, huh? There were some big ideas behind these big gowns. We’ve deduced that many were inspired by art.
The theme was derived from an art-centric dystopian J.G. Ballard short story wherein a Count and his wife pick “time flowers” to fend off an angry mob attacking their Palladian estate. Their garden is soon picked bare, they’re overrun, and the last time flower ravages their estate with accelerated time and petrifies them into statuary.
Many of the guests surely did their reading and were inspired by the statues at the ending (which we just ruined) and then ran with it and took art as an inspiration for their gala ensembles. Some celebs did it with aplomb and it was a garden of delights! Others didn’t have much of a green thumb and looked like they were planting some onions. Here are some of the Met Ball looks and the masterpieces that surely inspired them.
Lana Del Rey
Left: Lana Del Rey attends the 2024 Met Gala. Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images. Right: Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in an Oak Grove [detail] (1810). Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.
Lana Del Rey understands heartache and pain, but she also totally gets the Armageddon aspect of the prompt. To fulfill this chicly doom-laden vision, she turned to the late dark magician of fashion Alexander McQueen and the allegorical German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. The nascent McQueen designer Shaun Leane updated a 1996 look from the house’s founder. Del Rey’s mosquito-proof look fabulously channeled Friedrich’s morose metaphysical planes.
Serena Williams
Left: Serena Williams attends The 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty. Right: an undated Jeff Koons Balloon Dog sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.
Metallics are in. Oh, the sheen of that gold! At first glance, Serena Williams looked like a ravishing Ferrero Rocher candy in her custom gold foil-laminated silk taffeta Balenciaga gown. Was she dressed as one of her myriad trophies? And then it struck us: the gleaming, sleek majesty of a Jeff Koons Balloon Dog.
Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky
Left: Elsa Pataky and Chris Hemsworth attend The 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Theo Wargo/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images. Right: The painter Ad Reinhardt during a 1963 exhibition of his abstract paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Robert R. McElroy/Getty Images.
This was a confusing couple at first. In her nude gown, was she kind of giving Eve? In his off-cream Tom Ford suit, is it That 70s Thor? No, they weren’t inspired by monotony, but maybe the theory of drabness. They were inspired by Ad Reinhardt’s monochrome minimal abstract paintings.
Cardi B
Left: Cardi B attends The 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Arturo Holmes/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue. Right: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Surrounded Islands (1980–83), Biscayne Bay, Miami. Photo by Wolfgang Volz ©1983 Christo.
Haters are gonna say she wore a burnt Rihanna omelet dress, but Cardi B tore. She must have been thinking about Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping entire islands and monuments in material when she commissioned her dress by the Chinese label Windowsen. Accentuated with a towering Ronettes beehive wrap turban and giant emeralds, Cardi B was a red carpet sensation in her voluminous gown. It’s 3,000 meters of organza that spread out and absorbed the grand staircase. She required seven men to help carry and unfurl and position its undulating expanse. According to WWD, the brand’s designer, Sensen Lii, equated the hue to “fertile, black soil used for planting crops and flowers.” In that case, Cardi was a vast fertile field.
Zendaya
Left: Zendaya attends The 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Arturo Holmes/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue. Right: James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Jeckyll, The Peacock Room (1876–1877). Collection of the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
After a five-year hiatus, Zendaya returned to the Met Gala with a feather in her cap—literally. The 27-year-old actress, styled by Law Roach, wore a veiled fascinator with a shimmery plume as the finishing touch to her grace-meets-grunge look. Her gown, by Maison Margiela, was a mermaid-cut in shimmering hues of blues, adorned with fruits. The ensemble’s colors called to mind a peacock, we thought—an ancient symbol of eternity. Perhaps Zendaya had taken cues from the National Museum of Asian Art’s 19th-century Peacock Room, with its glittery metallic gold designs by created by James McNeill Whistler and Thomas Jeckyll, which speaks to the synthesis of Eastern and Western styles.
Eddie Redmayne and Hannah Bagshawe
Left: Hannah Bagshawe and Eddie Redmayne attend The 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue. Right: Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Eddie Redmayne and his wife Hannah Bagshawe looked an expressionistic vision in black and white on the red… err… green carpet. Styled by the young designer Steve O. Smith, the couple could have been mistaken for a Franz Kline canvas on legs, we thought. The Ab Ex master’s unique black-and-white style was inspired by the print of the daily newspaper—a nod to time’s quotidian realties.
Doja Cat
Left: Doja Cat wears Vetements at the Met Gala 2024. Photo: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images. Right: the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum. Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
Is that? Did she? Yes, Doja Cat took to the Met Gala carpet in a literal wet t-shirt ensemble that to our studious minds recalls the “wet sheet” drapery of the contested Elgin Marbles (aka the Parthenon Marbles). To get the effect of the body-clinging material, the team behind the Vetements vetement used… hair gel. According to Doja, the outfit’s nod to the garden theme was in the t-shirt’s origin: the cotton plant.
Nell Diamond
Left: Nell Diamond at the Met Gala 2024. Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images. Right: Frederic Leighton, Flaming June (1895). Museo de Arte de Ponce.
For her green carpet debut at the Met Gala, Hill House Home founder Nell Diamond channeled Frederic Leighton’s iconic portrait Flaming June (1895). Diamond’s flowing deep orange gown echoed the Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, which she cited as her favorite artwork, and which she deconstructed as part of her undergraduate thesis on the famed tresses of Victorian women. Perhaps the so-comfortable-you-could-sleep-in-it portrait inspired Diamond’s runaway viral hit, the “Nap Dress.”
Sabrina Harrison
Left: Sabrina Harrison at the 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Arturo Holmes/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue. Right: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Timepieces added a thematic punch to the “Garden of Time” ensembles of many a celeb this year—but Sabrina Harrison didn’t relegate herself to just a single accent. Instead she donned a gold bodice dress with its very own clock—with a surrealist droopiness—with dozens of glittering watch faces adorning it all around. Salvador Dalí’s masterpiece The Persistence of Memory—on view at the Museum of Modern Art about 30 blocks south—seems the obvious reference point. The painting explores the mutability of time and the ways that the past, present, and future can shift with perspective.
Lauren Sánchez
Left: Lauren Sánchez attends the 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images. Right: Sarah Sze, Times Zero (2023). Collection of the artist. © Sarah Sze. Photo: David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
It came as no surprise that countless attendees would default to floral. We know. Groundbreaking. But Lauren Sánchez certainly shattered expectations in an Oscar de la Renta gown featuring mosaic appliqués in the form of broken stained-glass roses. While Sánchez posed for photos with her fiancé, Jeff Bezos, the design—a custom twist on the house’s “Art Nouveau” fall collection, which drew inspiration from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s iconic glasswork—caught our attention for its similarity to Sarah Sze’s kaleidoscopic 2023 creation Times Zero. Exhibited in Sze’s outstanding solo show “Timelapse” last year at the Guggenheim, the mixed-media masterpiece depicts shards of images swirling in two vortexes that echo one another—not unlike the mirrored tapestry of rosettes across Sánchez’s dress.
Huma Abedin
Left: Huma Abedin attends the 2024 Met Gala. Photo: Theo Wargo/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images. Right: Damien Hirst, Can’t Buy Me Love (2007). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The former U.S. Secretary of State Huma Abedin’s emerald ensemble, affixed with bejeweled bug broaches, reminded us instantly of Damien Hirst’s Can’t Buy Me Love (2007), one of the British artist’s many famous works featuring butterflies. Except unlike Hirst, whose creations often fixate solely on the fluttering insects as symbols of love, beauty, and the fragility of life, Abedin seemed to celebrate nature’s richness with a few additional critters flitting across her dress, including dragonflies, spiders, and winged beetles.
Dua Lipa
Left: Dua Lipa attends the 2024 Met Gala. Photo by Theo Wargo/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images. Right: Giovanni Boldini, Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge (1905). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.
After co-chairing the 2023 Met Gala—and fresh off a weekend releasing her latest album Radical Optimism and hosting Saturday Night Live—Dua Lipa arrived at this year’s fête ready to throw down. Wearing a custom Marc Jacobs look that brought boudoir dressing to the green carpet with its seductive mix of black lace, satin corsetry, and a dramatic feather boa, she appeared to have leapt straight from Italian master Giovanni Boldini’s exuberant canvas Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge (1905). Employing the signature sweeping brushstrokes that earned him the titled “Master of Swish,” Boldini painted a Spanish dancer—possibly Rosita Mauri, the most important Spanish prima ballerina of the 19th century and a popular subject for artists including Degas, Manet, and Renoir—amidst the swirling energy of Paris’s bustling cabaret. It’s an extraordinary example of why Ballets Russes choreographer Serge Lifar called Boldini the “magician of movement”—and a natural reference Jacobs may have plucked for a sensational contemporary singer and dancer such as Dua Lipa.