Hunter Schafer Wears an Artfully Shredded Dress to the Met Gala
She nails the carpet in Prada
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Hunter Schafer has made Prada's Met Gala ambassador role look less like a contract and more like a creative partnership — and her third appearance together proved the formula hasn't gotten old. For this year's gala, themed around the Costume Institute's new Costume Art exhibit, Schafer arrived in a beige dress that understood the assignment on a structural level: artfully shredded, deliberately unraveling, and thoroughly intentional about every frayed edge.
The Prada-designed piece featured short sleeves and rose appliqués arranged into an empire waist, but the real tension was in the skirt — deliberate rips cut through the fabric to expose a blue floral lining that swept behind her as she moved. According to Harper's Bazaar, soft blonde waves and a grey flower hairpin completed the look, the latter echoing her smoky eye shadow in a way that felt considered rather than coordinated. The overall effect: romantic destruction, which, frankly, is a mood.
A Three-Peat Worth Tracking
Schafer's Met Gala record with Prada now reads like a deliberate arc. In 2021, for In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, she wore a crystal-embellished metallic silver two-piece with sculptural face jewelry and white contacts — sci-fi and severe. Last year's Superfine: Tailoring Black Style brought a sharp black-and-white suit with an oversized jacket and a beret that leaned mannish and precise. This year's shredded beige felt like the emotional third act: softer in color, more complex in construction, and interested in beauty that isn't entirely intact.
The gala itself was co-chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams, with a committee that included Zoë Kravitz, Sabrina Carpenter, Misty Copeland, Paloma Elsesser, and others. The Costume Art exhibit at the Costume Institute explores fashion's relationship to the body across a range of human experiences — the pregnant body, the aging body — making the "Fashion Is Art" dress code less of a vague directive and more of a provocation about what bodies are allowed to mean.
Schafer's look responded to that provocation directly: a dress that looks like it survived something is still, undeniably, a dress — and in the context of an exhibit about bodies in all their states, that reads as more than coincidence.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
