Met Gala: Dazed editors pick their wildcard looks for this year – Dazed

It may be less than a week to go until this year’s Met Gala, but that’s when things really start to ramp up. Stars are racing to final fittings, designers are working through the day and night, and assistants are getting screamed at for minor infractions that would otherwise go unnoticed. That’s fashion, baby! This year the theme is Garden of Time, a horticulture-coded short story by JG Ballard, but the actual Met exhibit is Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, a reference to historical fashion so fragile it can’t be moved from the musuem’s archive. While the (admittedly quite confused) guestlist will already have their final looks on lock, Dazed staff still have a lot of opinions about what they’d like to see ascend the staircase outside the Met – so scroll down for all our wildcard archive picks for this year’s event.
Every year I pray for someone to think outside of the box at the Met Gala, and every year I am disappointed, but were someone to truly put their mind to doing something different on the red carpet, I’d hope they’d look to Hussein Chalayan’s infamous 1993 graduate collection, The Tangent Flows. With the theme this year drawing inspiration from JG Ballard’s The Garden of Time, it’s already pretty obvious guests will interpret this as florals, but the book is far darker than Vogue’s dressing guide would suggest – speaking to themes of creation, destruction, and decay, the offering that Chalayan buried in his friend’s garden for three months and then dug up seems like a perfect, unique choice and a great way to showcase some truly innovative fashion history.
Alexander McQueen closed his SS07 show, Sarabande, with a dress created from hundreds of live roses, hydrangeas and silk organza. As the model slowly made her way down the catwalk, the fresh flowers fell to the floor, leaving behind a trail in her wake. A floral dress for a garden-themed ball is, granted, not groundbreaking. But how could any resist when the dress in question is so achingly, hauntingly beautiful? When it’s both breathtaking and morbid – a stark reminder that things fall apart, that we will all one day die and decay. The Garden of Time calls into play ideas of both creation and destruction, ideas McQueen had in mind when he was designing the darkly romantic collection. “Things rot,” he said at the time. “I used flowers because they die.”
For this reason, the original version of dress has long since been lost but several reincarnations have been produced since 2007, so I see no reason why another one can’t be made for the Met Ball. And if the finale dress is too obvious, this look, brimming with flowers, from the same collection is the next best thing.
So we all know most Met Gala guests aren’t ones for subtlety, and will probably interpret Garden of Time quite literally. But at the end of Ballard’s short story, an angry mob descends on the villa of a rich count and his wife, only to find them as stone statues in their overgrown garden. Jean Paul Gaultier may not have been the first to make trompe-l’oeil statue clothing, but he did it the best. There’s a dress from SS96 already in the Met’s archive that would fit the bill perfectly, or the shirt version that Robin Williams famously wore is also cool. Also I quite like the symbolism of a celeb dressing up as the count and countess, who swaddle themselves in riches, unaware of the chaos of the outside world.
But if someone else wanted to really go all out on the statue theme, it would be quite funny to show up as a big rock. Comme Des Garçons had some bulging, stone-like frocks in its AW17 collection, and they look like they’ve been decaying in the Garden of Time for a while. And instead of Pat McGrath on the make-up I’d get in Peeta Mellark from The Hunger Games so he can disguise the wearer as a rock on the steps of the Met.
I think the Lady Gaga meat dress really captures the theme with an irony, humour and wit that Doja Cat exudes. It would need to be the one currently rotting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m imagining a lot of archival gowns that High Fashion Twitter will climax over no doubt, but I personally just want to see something fun and frivolous! A little bit silly but most importantly on theme and with ample effort made.
Since you asked I couldn’t stop thinking about Hunter Schafer pulling off the iconic swan dress Björk wore at the Oscars in 2001. To be honest the theme sounds quite boring, but this could be a fun take on it and I wonder what the reaction would be nowadays if the beloved princess of the red carpet showed up wearing it? Would she also wear the same tint of pink lipstick Björk had on? It just sounds so perfect…
When I heard this year’s Met theme my internet rotten brain cell immediately thought, “florals for spring? Groundbreaking.” And apart from Devil Wears Prada, I immediately thought of the finale dress from Alexander McQueen’s SS07 show, Sarabande. Truly one of McQueen’s biggest moments, the dress featured real flowers which began to fall off as the model moved down the catwalk, leaving a trail of roses. McQueen shared post-show that it wasn’t intentional, shutting down all the “romanticised” reviews that critics wrote. It’s a piece of fashion history that brands are trying so hard to replicate these days, with any gimmick they can think of.
I’m obsessed with this wedding pickle look. It’s Yves Saint Laurent’s knitted cocoon bridal dress from 1965, but recreated for the SS02 couture collection. It’s giving moth ready-to-be-awakened and also chic sleeping bag – all the thematic boxes are ticked. It’s also kind of the perfect look for a kooky comedian who doesn’t want to wear something too serious but is also happy to be meme-ified the following day for looking like a giant tampon.
There are only a handful of old shows I rewatch as often as I watch Alexander McQueen’s infamous SS01 show Voss. Locking models in a glass box, it is one of his most celebrated and widely discussed shows. While The Garden of Time can be interpreted as spring, florals and blossoming, JG Ballard’s text is just as much about destruction, isolation and rebirth.
I can’t think of many designers who explored suffering and humanity as poetically as McQueen did. Voss explores death and decay, and over two decades later his exploration of pain and beauty still feels apt. While I would love but highly doubt to see someone recreate writer Michelle Olley’s iconic moment laying naked with a respirator, I want to see someone in one of the many iconic ruffled feather looks or dramatic bird headpiece. But I only want to see it if it’s done right. If you’re going to half do a McQueen tribute, please just stay at home.

source