The Met Gala’s dress code always encourages interpretation, but this year it practically begged for it.
While inside the museum the “Costume Art” exhibition offered a thoughtful, almost academic meditation on the dressed body in art across the centuries, on the steps the Fashion Is Art–themed red carpet presented something else entirely: a prompt, even a dare, to get a little literal. Some guests nodded politely to the theme. Others showed up ready to hang.
If the exhibition is about ideas, the fashion was about references: big, bold, occasionally delightfully on-the-nose ones. While Gracie Abrams shimmered straight out of Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Rachel Zegler delivered full historical drama by way of The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. Madonna didn’t just reference Leonora Carrington, she channeled her—entourage and all—and Heidi Klum went all in on The Veiled Virgin. And then there was the night’s most unexpected trio: three separate takes on Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, courtesy of Claire Foy, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and Julianne Moore—proof that even one scandalous strap can have a long afterlife.
Here, a tour through the looks that didn’t just nail the assignment—they practically cited their sources.
Cardi B in Marc Jacobs: Hans Bellmer sculptures
Photo: Taylor Hill / Getty Images
Hans Bellmer, La Poupee. Seconde Partie (The Doll. Part II), 1936, hand tinted photo.© 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Bridgeman Images
Cardi B arrived as a Surrealist fever dream courtesy of Marc Jacobs, with her body reworked into the uncanny proportions of Hans Bellmer. Bellmer, a 1930s provocateur, is best known for his disturbing, meticulously staged photographs of dolls—limbs rearranged, torsos doubled, bodies fragmented into something both hyperfeminine and deeply unsettling. Jacobs pulled directly from that visual language, exaggerating Cardi’s hips, shoulders, and silhouette into something sculptural and slightly off-kilter.
Gracie Abrams in Chanel: Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)
Photo: Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images
Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, gold leaf, oil on canvas.Photo: Heritage Images / Getty Images