The artworks that inspired eight of the most stunning Met Gala looks

From Heidi Klum as a veiled Vestal virgin to singer Ciara as a gold-encrusted bust of Nefertiti, here is the art behind the fashion at the Met Gala.

Fashion is Art was the theme for this year's Met Gala, which falls annually on the first Monday of May. The event marks the opening of the latest exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute – and is a chance for celebrities on the Anna Wintour-approved guestlist to scale the Met steps in the most glamorous, fantastical, exuberant, fun, daft and occasionally highbrow outfits that they and their styling teams can get their hands on.

This year's theme came with the memo that it was a moment for attendees to "express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate the countless depictions of the dressed body throughout art history". Here are eight of the outfits that were inspired by works of art.

The singer Rosé, the New Zealand-born member of the South Korean pop group Blackpink, wore a largely unassuming black, strapless dress – the work of Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello – but it was inspiration from the art world that made it soar. Riffing on the depictions of birds in the work of French 20th-Century painter Georges Braque, the look featured a brick-sized bird brooch.

Rosé had worked with her stylist, or "image architect" as he likes to be known, Law Roach, on the look that was also inspired by the Saint Laurent collections of spring 1998 and spring 2002 couture. As she told Vogue: "We landed on this very classic Saint Laurent look, and as we were studying, I learned that YSL has repeatedly used this bird design."

The Girls creator, who recently debuted her memoir, Famesick, was back on the Met Gala red carpet for the first time since 2019, wearing a dramatic all-red Valentino look by Alessandro Michele. The asymmetrical red silk, sequinned dress bedecked with crow's feathers had been inspired by one specific aspect of the painting Judith Slaying Holofernes: the blood.

Speaking to Vogue, Dunham explains that she shared the idea to use that painting as inspiration with Alessandro, "but because his brain works in the most magical ways, rather than leaning into the Renaissance garments or the swords or any of it, he was attracted to a particular blood spatter on the neck of Holofernes."

Painted circa 1620 by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who became the first woman to enter the Academy of Art and Design in Florence, it now hangs in Florence's Uffizi gallery.

It might have been custom Bottega Veneta who made it, but it's the US artist John Singer Sargent whose work was the genesis of Julianne Moore's elegant black dress with one strap slipping down. The look alluded to Sargent's portrait of Madame Gautreau, better known as Madame X, which caused a scandal when it was first unveiled in Paris in 1884.

The reason behind the shock? As art critic Jonathan Jones argued in the Guardian: "it was the dress that caused the distress." Describing it as "aristocratically anti-bourgeois", he notes that "Madame Gautreau wears a black dress that is almost strapless except for two slender gold threads; money and sex are both flaunted by a fashion utterly incompatible with bourgeois life."

In New York high society in 2026, the look has ruffled far fewer feathers. Although the other socialite to wear a dress aping the painting – Lauren Sánchez Bezos's take was the work of Schiaparelli designer Daniel Roseberry – has caused her fair share of controversies.

The painting, aptly, is part of the Met's permanent collection.

Euphoria star Hunter Schafer's apparently ripped and dishevelled look was in fact custom Prada. Inspired by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt's 1912/1913 painting Mäda Primavesi, which is part of the Met's permanent collection, the dress mimicked the custom Emilie Flöge design worn by the nine-year-old girl depicted in the painting.

Primavesi's father, Otto Primavesi, was a patron of the arts who reportedly made a habit of inviting artists to his country house during World War One. One of those artists was Klimt, who he commissioned to paint his daughter. Schafer's take was hyperbolised – this is the Met Gala after all – via a long train that spread out over the steps. But Shafer did stick to the brief in other key ways, not least by reproducing Mäda's blue eyeshadow.

Dree Hemingway is an American model, actress and great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, and most recently played Daryl Hannah in Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette. 

Her custom Valentino gown by Alessandro Michele evokes many 17th Century paintings, in particular The Portrait of Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria, by Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens, which now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Hemingway's delicate silver lurex, embroidery and feathers, married with a theatrical crinoline collar edged in gold, seems to mimic the operatic, densely pleated collars of the Elizabethan era.

But the ensemble also has more recent artistic inspiration, given that it was part of Valentino's 2026 Specula Mundi Haute Couture collection, which had been inspired by 19th-Century Kaiserpanorama viewing devices. 

Anne Hathaway's custom Michael Kors dress was designed in collaboration with US artist Peter McGough. But it was the work of the British Romantic poet John Keats, specifically his Ode on a Grecian Urn, which inspired it.

The 1819 poem ends on an enigmatic line that has been almost as widely discussed as Anna Wintour's famous bob: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The hand-painted gown evokes poem, bringing to mind the exquisite Grecian urns of the ancient world, in particular this terracotta bell-krater created in 350-325 BC.

The black silk and Mikado ball gown had been hand-painted by McGouth with a dove of peace and a goddess of peace on the train, leading some to cite it as one of the evening's rare nods to politics.

The German-American supermodel is known as the queen of Halloween for her love of a costume and dedication to a brief. So the Met Gala and she are a natural fit. She didn't disappoint, turning up dressed as the 1847 sculpture by Raffaelle Monti, the Veiled Vestal. The Vestal Virgins were, according to EBSCO, "responsible for maintaining the sacred fire of Vesta, which symbolised the security of Rome".

One can only imagine what the Italian sculptor, or the 6th Duke of Devonshire who commissioned the work, would have made of Klum's look, but you'd hope they'd appreciate the effort: Klum even went so far as to accessorise with grey contacts and painted hands, face and teeth.

While it's unclear what form-fitting material Klum wore, the original sculpture, which now sits in Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, was carved from three blocks of Carrara marble. 

Speaking to Vogue Arabia, the singer Ciara described how she was wearing "gold on gold on gold", from her gown to her jewellery, to represent the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti, whose name means "the Beautiful One Is Here". According to Ciara: "Nefertiti was very very powerful… and I wanted to represent that". 

Nefertiti apparently "holds the position as the Egyptian queen with the most surviving appearances on monuments and other artistic mediums" according to research by Harvard University. She has been a muse to Grace Jones, and the Met is home to several ancient Egyptian artifacts depicting her. Now she can add the Met Gala to her catalogue. 

Often depicted with a theatrically towering crown, in modern parlance, Nefertiti is very Met Gala-coded. 

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