Freaky Monday! The Most Uncanny Moments on the 2026 Met Gala Red Carpet

Reported by Vogue.

Yes, the naked dresses and Grecian draping were there — Kendall, Hailey, the whole sylph parade. But the 2026 Met Gala's "Fashion is Art" dress code also summoned something stranger, more unsettling, and significantly more interesting: extra limbs, painted-on hands, mirrored astronaut visors, and at least one antique porcelain doll with an agenda. According to Vogue, a defiant subcurrent of the uncanny ran through the night, and it deserves more than a footnote.

French pop star and model Yseult arrived in a fluid Harris Reed tuxedo dress anchored by a hand-beaded gold corset — and yes, a hand-beaded bellybutton. "We worked on various ideas that really cast her as the art piece: like a statue draped in fabric," Reed explained. The final look, finished with a halo headpiece and asymmetric melting eye shadow, treated her body not as something to be displayed but as the actual medium. Jewelry designer Sabine Getty, a first-time attendee, wore a sheer Ashi Studio illusion gown with painted hands sculpted around her waist and chest — someone else's grip, rendered permanent in fabric. Gwendoline Christie went further into art-historical territory in a scarlet Giles Deacon tulle gown, feathered Stephen Jones headpiece, and a mask by Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing — its flush cheeks and crimson lips mirroring Christie's own face, painted by Pat McGrath, in a nod to John Singer Sargent and a 1938 photograph interrogating vanity and dual identity.

Bodies as Sculpture, Selves as Installation

Robert Wun brought his shape-warping couture to the carpet and delivered two of the night's most conceptually loaded looks. Jordan Roth wore a gray gown and a 3D-printed sculpture embracing him from behind — a second body, mid-passion. "My curiosity was, 'what would it be like to be a body in that sculpture, to live in that sculpture?'" Roth told Vogue. BLACKPINK's Lisa wore custom Wun too: her own arms, 3D-scanned by the designer, repositioned around her silhouette to echo the flow of traditional Thai dance. The body as self-portrait, essentially. Then Katy Perry arrived in custom Stella McCartney white with a Miodrag Guberinic mirrored visor and gloves featuring a sixth finger — a pointed jab at AI image generation's notorious hand problem. She pulled tarot cards on the red carpet. Of course she did.

María Zardoya brought a 1910–1925 porcelain doll in a diaphanous pink Matières Fécales gown, describing it as a stand-in for her younger self — the barefoot girl running around her family's Puerto Rican countryside home. She's now auctioning the doll, with all proceeds going to Save the Music Foundation, which funds arts programs in underserved public schools. Madonna showed up with a top hat and seven ladies-in-waiting, channeling Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington — the same artist who inspired her 1994 "Bedtime Story" video. And Heidi Klum did what Heidi Klum does: painted herself to look like marble, inspired by Giovanni Strazza's sculpture The Veiled Virgin.

When fashion is actually treated as art — not as a caption, but as a proposition — the red carpet stops being a runway and starts being an argument worth having.

Read the original at Vogue.