Cardi B’s gigantic Windowsen dress at the 2024 Met Gala literally stopped traffic. Her garment was so sprawling that it nearly spanned the carpet’s full width, and she needed about nine handlers—nine!—to help her up the stairs. As she neared the top, a reporter shouted out, “How much does that dress weigh?” Cardi, with her typical candor, replied: “If I’m 135, this is like 140!”
The Met Gala has a long history of sartorial extravagance. (Many recalled Rihanna’s 2015 Guo Pei stunner upon seeing Cardi’s ’fit.) But this year, there seemed to be a higher quotient of dresses that called for a couple of helping hands than usual.
For one: Tyla, in a column made of “sand.” The popular Instagram meme account @betches posted a video showing the singer being carried, upright, to the entrance of the Met. “I’m not high-maintenance,” the caption read. Then: “Also me,” as Tyla took not one step. Yet her look was worth the trouble—a sand-and-sediment masterpiece by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain. On the carpet, Rousteing said, “It’s made of sand, the idea being that you can only wear it once, but the memory will last forever.”
Elsewhere, Kim Kardashian needed help getting into the museum on account of her hyper-corseted Maison Margiela by John Galliano; and Camilla Cabello had to hand off her clutch—an actual block of ice frozen (and then dripping) around a single rose—to somebody else before her fingers went blue.
When Gigi Hadid alighted in an extra-voluminous Thom Browne dress, adorned with yellow roses, she not only required assistance from handlers walking up the stairs, but also a mindblowing amount of handiwork to create the look: it took over 13,500 hours to assemble and boasted a (possibly record-breaking) 2.8 million embroidered micro-beads. This one not only took a village, but an entire damn metropolis.
See All the Celebrity Looks From the Met Gala 2024 Red Carpet:
1 / 100Photo: Getty ImagesZendaya in Vintage Givenchy
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