2024 Met Gala: The Biggest Names and Biggest Moments From the ‘Garden of Time’ (2024)

Rihanna, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift missed the Met Gala.

Other notable absences from the red carpet: Beyoncé, who had not been expected to attend, and Rihanna, who seemed poised to be the closing act of fashion’s annual parade of one-upmanship.

Last year, every other guest had walked the carpet — as had one uninvited co*ckroach — before Rihanna arrived at 10:15 p.m., wrapped in Valentino camellias that she said made her feel “expensive.”

Rihanna, 36, who swung from pop stardom into a prosperous second act as a lingerie and makeup mogul, told Extra TV earlier in the week that she had planned on attending the gala. People magazine reported on Monday that the singer had come down with the flu.

The singer had become one of the most hotly anticipated presences on the Met’s steps. Her turn as a miniskirted pope in 2018 touched off an internet frenzy, and the 55-pound, daffodil yellow gown she wore in 2015 helped earn its designer a slot on the haute couture schedule in Paris.

The gala’s influence as a joint advertising opportunity for brands, sponsors and celebrities depends in part on the level of star power that is willing to show up. The gala still attracted boldface names this year, including Zendaya and Jennifer Lopez, but many fans online said that the lack of Rihanna had been a blow. (Some even circulated images of the singer hitting the carpet that appeared to have been created by artificial intelligence.)

Rihanna has been a frequent presence at the gala in recent years, but Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have not attended since 2016.

Ms. Swift began attending the gala in 2008 and was a co-chair in 2016. In the past year she has not exactly been hurting for the Met’s spotlight: Her Eras Tour stimulated both economic and seismic activity on its yearlong (and counting) romp around the world, and her recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” overcame mixed reviews to become her 14th release to hit reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.

Beyoncé attended the gala seven times from 2008 to 2016, toying with silhouette in strapless Armani and mermaid-style Emilio Pucci gowns. She has lately been leading a high-fashion rodeo in wide-brimmed hats and western boots while promoting her album “Cowboy Carter.”

Even without showing up to the Met on the first Monday in May, Beyoncé wields immense power in the fashion sphere, Vanessa Friedman, the chief fashion critic of The New York Times, recently wrote: “She is practically a Met Gala unto herself.”

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Zendaya is a star so big that she made two arrivals on the red carpet.

The third thing you need to know about the dress is that it was originally Look No. 8 of Mr. Galliano’s first Givenchy couture collection, back when the appointment of the upstart Brit at the venerable Parisian house had set all of French fashion into an affronted tizzy.

And the last thing you need to know is that all those things, added together at a peak eyeball moment, amount to a major declaration of independence by Zendaya, and perhaps the next step in Mr. Galliano’s return to the bosom of fashion following the documentary “” and his much lauded January Maison Margiela couture show.

For Zendaya, the look, which was designed the year she was born, nods to the evening’s dress code in being vintage, rare and, with its full skirt and laced-up bodice, recalls the aristocracy of the ancien régime. It also represents “an investment in herself,” said Rita Watnick, the founder of Lily et Cie, the vintage clothing dealer in Los Angeles who sold the dress to Zendaya and Law Roach, her “image architect.”

“It says, ‘I am not an emissary for a brand,’” Ms. Watnick went on. “‘I am my own emissary.’” That’s quite a news bulletin at a party that has become, for many brands and celebrities, a quasi-advertising moment.

As for Mr. Galliano, his dresses have reappeared on red carpets before, but never under quite as big a spotlight. (Zendaya also wore vintage Galliano — a look from his spring 1998 collection — to Anna Wintour’s pre-Met dinner.) And while he may not have been granted the retrospective exhibition that the Met was rumored to have considered, being worn by an extremely high-profile co-host of the party of the year may be the next best thing.

‘Naked dressing’ was a trend at the Met Gala.

All were part of a red carpet trend toward sheer gowns, or, as The New York Times’s chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, has called it: “naked dressing.” The typical parade of opaque dresses was usurped by delicate constructions of mesh, lace and beads that allowed risqué glimpses of skin.

Nakedness on the red carpet may still scandalize, but it is time tested: Consider Rose McGowan’s backless mesh dress at the Video Music Awards in 1998, which she has described as a statement about reclaiming her body. On the Met Gala carpet this year, the approach seemed to catch on more than usual, even after barely-there clothing took over the spring 2023 runways in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

Perhaps it had to do with the gala’s reputation for one-upmanship: What better way to distinguish oneself from hundreds of well-dressed competitors than to wear practically nothing at all? Or maybe it had to do with the evening’s dress code, “The Garden of Time,” which might have gotten designers thinking about Adam and Eve.

Whatever the motivation, the see-through gowns kept coming: on Greta Lee, in lacy Loewe; on Jennifer Lopez, in beaded peek-a-boo Schiaparelli; and on Elle Fanning, in translucent resin from Balmain.

The model Emily Ratajkowski, who wore a backless Versace gown with beaded tendrils, said in an interview that she felt a certain confidence in her exposure.

“It feels really natural on me,” she said. “Comfortable, truly.”

Jessica Testa contributed reporting.

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Kim Kardashian stuns in a breathtaking corset that leaves little room to breathe.

Viewers on social media immediately took notice. “Kim Kardashian honestly looks so uncomfortable and like she can barely move or even breathe,” posted one observer. “Fashion shouldn’t be like that.”

“Everyone is snatching their waist,” another wrote on X. “They said the one rule in the garden of time is no breathing, from Bad Bunny to Kim Kardashian.”

The corseting had been a feature of Mr. Galliano’s much ballyhooed January Margiela couture show, where it had been worn by both men and women, and where “making of” photographs on Mr. Galliano’s mood boards displayed the bruises left on the models’ flesh by the lacing. (Ms. Kardashian had been in the front row of that show.)

In the incarnation worn this time around by Ms. Kardashian, the corset was re-imagined in an antique silver brocade, and paired with a sheer silver metal skirt covered in lacy flowers, twigs, and mirror shards, to reflect the evening’s dress code, “The Garden of Time.” The idea of suffering for fashion, it turns out, is everlasting.

Gina Cherelus contributed reporting.

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Isabelle Huppert’s Balenciaga dress pays homage to her ancestors.

To honor that dress and that relationship, Demna, the mononymic creative director of Balenciaga, re-created the white silk for Ms. Huppert. With its simple, long-sleeved overblouse and scalloped cathedral-length train, the gown — which required over 300 hours of work — has a genetic relationship to Demna’s own work at Balenciaga. But it has been updated with some signature touches, such as shoulder pads and a turtleneck, while also time-traveling across the decades.

To give the oyster-colored silk satin the patina of age, the fabric was sprayed with water and sanded with the kind of abrasive paper used in high jewelry. Stains were hand-painted on, and the underside burned with a blowtorch for further discoloration. The result is a very fashion take on the idea of the family tree.

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Amanda Seyfried asked for a ‘sustainable’ Met Gala dress.

“If I’m going to go to the Met ball,” she said, “there has to be solar panels on my head, or I’m not going.”

This was a joke, but Ms. Seyfried takes sustainability seriously. Around the time she starred in “The Dropout” — she portrayed the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, for which she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe — she co-founded a company that makes children’s playhouses from eco-friendly materials.

On Monday night, many attendees executed the Met Gala theme, “Garden of Time,” by leaning into florals. Pretty flowers were printed on gowns and pinned to tuxedos. Nevermind that the J.G. Ballard short story that inspired the theme was about an opulent estate under threat of an inevitable advancing mob.

Ms. Seyfried not only read that story, but interpreted the mob as “representing climate change,” her stylist, Elizabeth Stewart, said. “She asked if this dress could be sustainable, which is not always easy, because our business is about the new.”

Prada accepted, creating Ms. Seyfried’s gown from leftover deadstock fabric.

“You do what you can,” Ms. Stewart said, hoping to make what she called a “mini” statement.

The fabric, a crinkly silver satin antique, was repurposed from Prada’s spring 2009 collection. It reminded Ms. Seyfried of metallic textiles she wore while playing Marion Davies, the 1930s film star, in “Mank.”

That is not to say Prada’s design did not incorporate pretty flowers. Ms. Seyfried’s skirt, lifted at her hips by panniers — giving her “hips for days,” she said — was covered in flowers, embroidered in pink and silver and black.

Ms. Seyfried acknowledged that attending the Met Gala was a privilege, and she is grateful for the invitation, but she said the experience can be “very uncomfortable and awkward.” The red-carpet stairs are lonely. She, like most other attendees, cannot bring a guest, and it is a long and winding journey from the car outside to the bar inside.

This year, she was also worried about more than social awkwardness. Amid chaotic global events, including but not limited to climate change, the Met Gala has come to represent grandeur and wealth. (It remains an arts fund-raiser.) Protesters have assembled outside the museum in years past and were expected to assemble again. “It is going to be a target,” Ms. Seyfried said, conflicted.

“It is tricky to celebrate anything in this day and age. But we’re still going to do it, because the world is not going to stop moving. So if we can celebrate something good, we should.

“Ugh, it’s so tricky. Sorry. Anyway.”

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The police make arrests near the Met Gala while trying to contain protests.

Another larger group made its way along Fifth Avenue, with many participants waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Gaza! Gaza!” as they clapped and banged drums.

The New York Police Department, trying to create space between the protesters and the event, assembled barricades at various intersections surrounding the area, but around 6:30 p.m., as the glitz and glamour of the event’s red carpet arrivals were in full swing, the police began making arrests just a block away on Madison Avenue, drawing complaints from some of the protesters that the police had worn riot gear while arresting people who were assembling peacefully.

Nearby, Mark J. Levy, a 19-year-old student at Yeshiva University, stood on the sidewalk draped in an Israeli flag in counterprotest.

There were, however, people in the area who thought the night should be about the Met Gala, and not the protesters on either side of the war.

Among them was Cinthia Andrade, a freshman at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who was cheering the arrival of the singer Karol G as she reflected on the rumors that a protest could be nearing the area.

“As a college student, I feel it’s important we should be able speak up, and I support that,” Ms. Andrade said. “There have been protests for Palestine at my school, and they have been peaceful.”

But, she added, “I feel a protest here could be dangerous, though. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. This doesn’t feel like the appropriate place to me. This is a place for celebrities to be seen, and that’s fine, too.”

Closer to the gala itself, a young designer named Batoul al-Rashdan staged an impromptu photo shoot with a model to showcase her clothing designs against the backdrop of the event.

Ms. al-Rashdan said she was not worried that protests would interrupt the event.

“The police aren’t going to let them get this far,” she said. “We were barely even able to reach this street.”

The influx of people in the area, and the large police presence — at least one helicopter could be heard circling the area and police were still lingering at the corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue even after the protesters in that area began to disperse — had commuters jockeying for sidewalk space with both protesters and people there for the Met Gala.

Some passers-by along Fifth Avenue were heard referring to the protests as “antisemitic” and “anti-American.”

But like many other protesters, Alice Farley, 73, held her ground on Madison Avenue, carrying a sign that read “Ceasefire Now” with an American flag draped over it. Ms. Farley, a performance artist, said she joined the protesters earlier in the evening at Hunter College and made her way north with the group.

“I’ve been protesting since I was 10, but this in on another level,” Ms. Farley said of recent campus protests at Columbia University and elsewhere, many of which have led to changes or cancellations of commencement ceremonies.

Showing the wide mix of people in the area, a man wearing a kaffiyeh and riding a Citi Bike paused at the East 82nd Street police barricade and shouted, “Stop sending bombs to kill civilians,” at a group of people craning for a glimpse of the celebrities.

“Let’s go, Knicks,” one of the men in the crowd yelled in response. “That’s not funny,” the biker yelled back.

Later in the evening, around 8:30 p.m., a group of protesters — about a thousand according to an N.Y.P.D. officer — made its way south on Park Avenue, away from the museum, as the sun set. The “No Met Gala While Bombs Drop in Gaza” sign could be seen taped to a pole being raised high above the crowd.

By 10 p.m., the streets around the Met were relatively quiet, though police barricades remained in effect. Kirsten Agresta, a harpist who said she played during the evening’s festivities, stood beside one at East 86th Street, with her instrument, waiting for her ride home.

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Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s gown represents two debuts in one.

In 2022, she was so inspired by the Met Gala’s theme, “In America,” that she had a gown custom made, despite not having any way to attend. Her lack of invitation didn’t matter; Ms. Randolph had an idea that she wanted to express. She organized a photo shoot for the gown on a Louisiana plantation.

On Monday night, she finally walked the steps, wearing another custom-made gown. This one was inspired by 1700s evening wear, except rendered totally in denim.

The sprawling ball skirt reminded her of “tentacles,” she said. It would be removed inside the museum, revealing a slightly less dramatic bell-sleeve mermaid dress underneath.

But here was the surprise twist: The nautical gown was made by Gap. Although this may not be terribly surprising once you recall that Gap hired Zac Posen in February as its new creative director. Ms. Randolph’s dress is his first public-facing project for the company.

As a designer, Mr. Posen is known for his precisely draped evening gowns. He is also a Met Gala regular, having attended for the first time in 1997, when he was still in high school and interning at the museum’s Costume Institute. (He bought a discounted staff ticket.)

“I knew for sure the fit was going to be insane,” Ms. Randolph said of working with Mr. Posen. “I knew that this dress was going to look like it was poured on my body, which is very exciting for me as a curvy girl who likes to show her body.”

Gap, of course, is famous for its denim, which Mr. Posen called a “canvas for creativity.”

During a fitting at Gap’s office in Lower Manhattan on Saturday, Mr. Posen also pointed to the orange lining of the dress, which was inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Gap was founded in 1969 and where Mr. Posen moved about four months ago.

San Francisco gets a “bad rap,” despite being a “spectacular, special place,” said Mr. Posen, a native New Yorker. “It’s not a city that’s been over-polished and messed up by over-renovation.” The view from his new office is, he said, “the most beautiful screen saver I’ve ever seen.”

Ms. Randolph’s gown is something of a flex for Gap — a statement of confidence in Mr. Posen, as well as a bid toward more relevance in popular culture and the fashion industry. The company would like eventually to display the dress at its corporate office.

“When you create a gown, it’s like creating a brand,” said Mr. Posen, who accompanied Ms. Randolph to the museum in a tailored ivory tuxedo from Gap’s sister brand Banana Republic.

His team gave the suit new nacre shell buttons. Otherwise, it was off the rack.

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Tyla whips up a sandstorm on the Met carpet.

The tawny, strapless dress — made of three colors of sand — had a structured bodice that spread across her chest like a shoreline. A soft divot hinted at the whereabouts of her bellybutton. More sand slipped through the hourglass that she carried as a handbag.

Tyla, who broke out in the United States last year with the song “Water,” was attending her first Met Gala. She told reporters on the red carpet that the look was inspired by the sands of time.

She was not the only guest to turn to a chronology-related look based on the gala’s “Garden of Time” dress code: Sabrina Harrison wore a gold gown by Chrishabana, according to her Instagram, that appeared to be dripping with contorted gold clocks.

Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain, told Vogue that he created the gown in part because he was intrigued by sand’s transience. “The idea of sculpting a garment from something as ephemeral as sand ignited my imagination,” he said. “And I could not be happier with the end result.”

“The idea was crazy,” Tyla, 22, added. “And I loved it.”

Emily Ratajkowski was 10 when her dress was made.

“I have worn things that I have not felt comfortable in, and I do feel that it shows,” she said. “Maybe it shows in the way that I choose my hair and makeup, or the way I pose, or whatever.”

This year is different, she insisted. “It feels really natural on me — comfortable, truly,” Ms. Ratajkowski, 32, said on a video call about two weeks before the gala.

“It” is this: a long-sleeve backless gown from a 2001 Atelier Versace couture collection. The sheer white dress is intricately hand-beaded, with embellishments that cling to and dangle off her like miniature icicles.

Its fragility is what made Ms. Ratajkowski first take notice. “I just wanted to feel like I was wearing something that could be in the exhibit,” she said.

Because of the gala’s dress code — “Garden of Time,” which riffs on the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” — red-carpet watchers could expect one of two motifs: vegetation and vintage.

Ms. Ratajkowski hit both notes, while also referring back to her own style preferences (sheerness, opulence) and history.

She wore another vintage couture Versace gown to the Met Gala in 2022 — that one from 1992. It evoked a sexy, high-fashion Wonka: colorful and complicated, with a juicy bejeweled halter top connected to a similarly beaded choker. A silk-collaged skirt burst out from Ms. Ratajkowski’s hips, revealing her tanned legs and an interior lined with gold netting and fringe. The dress code then was “gilded glamour.”

To be able to wear vintage for a second time to fashion’s most celebrated (most lucrative, most clicked) evening was a “privilege,” her stylist Jorden Bickham said. “You’re going to an event where a lot of times you don’t have much say in what you’re wearing.” Many celebrities are dressed by the brands who invite them or by whomever Vogue nudges them to wear.

Ms. Bickham, who often dresses Ms. Ratajkowski in archival fashion when they work together, found the 2001 Versace gown at Tab Vintage, which specializes in bridal and special-occasion dressing.

Alexis Novak, the founder of Tab, said she bought it from a Versace collector.

“It’s one of those pieces you see and it’s immediately apparent that a lot of care and skill went into it,” Ms. Novak said. “When I finally saw it in person, the first thing I thought was, ‘This has to be seen.’”

The train is particularly delicate, which concerns Ms. Ratajkowski — to a point. As glamorous as the Met Gala seems, it involves a lot of “trekking” up museum stairs and through its halls, surrounded by an elite mob of fellow attendees.

“I’ve stepped on many a train, and I’ve had my train stepped on many times,” she said. “I respect the things I’m wearing, but once you get off the carpet, you’re a little bit like: ‘OK, let’s not be so precious. Let’s try to enjoy ourselves.’”

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Christian Cowan and Sam Smith step onto the carpet as a couple.

The pair, who have been rumored to be a couple for some time now, confirmed their relationship of about two years to The New York Times. In their first appearance at the Met Gala as guests, they hard-launched as a couple on the museum steps in matching white and black suits that reflected this year’s “Garden of Time” dress code.

Hours ahead of the festivities, Mr. Cowan, who designed and styled the garments, said he was feeling excited and not at all nervous as relaxed jazz played in his room at the Mark Hotel.

“I’m currently wearing eye patches, and it’s totally dreamy and chill,” he said.

Mr. Cowan, who has designed since he was 18, acknowledged that he is known for his glittery garments. He had no intention of abandoning that inclination, he said, but he wanted to show that he was still a “hard core fashion nerd,” this time through a more classic look that “represents a level of chicness.”

He took tailoring inspiration from Oscar Wilde, nodding to his preference for cravats, strong shoulders, long blazers and straight trousers. “There was an austereness to his suiting, and there was also a romance that I really was drawn to,” he said.

The shiny, metal-dipped red roses — electroplated in 24-karat gold and sterling silver — were affixed to the jackets as a clasp.

The flowers created a minor difficulty in the design process because of the heaviness of the metals. Mr. Cowan said they went through four variations so that the blazer had the right structure to support the weight.

“And it’s a functional closure,” he said. “We can pull it out and pull it in, which I think is fun.”

Smith, who is nonbinary, took a gender neutral approach and included a chiffon skirt that draped over trousers with significant side slits.

Their cravats matched their eye colors — brown for Mr. Cowan and blue for Smith.

Unlike the friction that could come about when dressing a partner, Mr. Cowan said that styling Smith had been a breeze because Smith has worked with major designers and understands the process.

“It was very collaborative, and because we’re partners, I do know Sam,” Mr. Cowan said. “So it’s nice to be able to design something for someone you know intimately.”

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Lauren Sanchez plays grande dame in Oscar de la Renta.

“Elevated” was the word used by Fernando Garcia, a creative director of Oscar de la Renta, who designed the dress with Laura Kim. Also “polished.”

The strapless black velvet gown with a bell-shaped skirt covered in a rose mosaic of 2,000 hand-painted white plexiglass shards turned Ms. Sánchez into the human equivalent of an antique Tiffany lamp. The primary focus was on the waist rather than the bosom; the vibe, more Astor or Vanderbilt than Mae West; the choice of designer, strategic.

“You come to us, you expect a certain aesthetic,” Mr. Garcia said.

With its florals and its Art Nouveau ethos, the frock nodded to the evening’s dress code, “The Garden of Time.” It was a pretty sure bet to get the approval of Anna Wintour, who was very close to Mr. de la Renta before his death in 2014 and who herself wore Oscar de la Renta to the Met Gala in 2021. It was a bit of boosterism for Mr. Bezos and his business, since Oscar de la Renta is one of the rare high-fashion brands that sells its ready-to-wear on Amazon.

And, perhaps, it was a covert sign of positioning to come. After all, the other people who have favored de la Renta for major public events include almost every first lady since Jackie Kennedy.

The point being, Ms. Sánchez can do society grande dame with the best of them — at least when she wants to. She just often decides otherwise.

“She’s proud of being hot, and I could feel it when she walks into the room,” Mr. Garcia said. “But she doesn’t come across like somebody who isn’t buying her seat on a table.” Her body, her choice.

The short story that is the Met Gala’s strange but fitting inspiration.

“The Garden of Time” appeared in the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and was included in the “The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard,” a collection published not long after the author’s death in 2009. The story describes the last days of Count Axel and his wife, known only as the Countess, who reside in a Palladian villa surrounded by a garden.

They pass the days in seclusion. The count busies himself by attending to rare manuscripts. The countess plays Bach and Mozart on a harpsichord.

The threat to their peaceful existence arrives in the form of an army on the horizon. As it moves closer, Count Axel develops a clearer view of this “vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers.” In an effort to turn back the advance of this “immense rabble,” he reverses time by plucking blooms from the garden’s most exquisite plant, the time flowers.

Soon enough, the last flower is plucked, and the mob overruns the property. The villa lies in ruins, and all that remains of the count and countess is a pair of statues “gazing out over the grounds” from behind a stand of thorn bushes.

“The Garden of Time” is a fitting but ironic choice as a theme for the year’s most lavish celebration. It’s fitting because the Met Gala celebrates the contemporary equivalents of aristocrats at a time of widespread social anger toward elites; it’s ironic because the reference suggests that the guests and hosts may be doomed.

The same Ballard story inspired a 2021 fashion collection by the designer Thom Browne. The clothing was understated and classic, and the clay-like makeup worn by some of Mr. Browne’s models suggested creatures halfway between statue and human.

The sympathies of “The Garden of Time” seem to lie with the count and countess. And yet the author slips in hints that their lovely existence may be empty. When Count Axel puts his arm around his wife’s waist, he realizes that “he had not embraced her for several years.”

In a 1975 interview with Science Fiction Monthly, Mr. Ballard denied that the story suggested that he missed a bygone way of life. “I think some social changes that took place in this country in the mid-’60s are the best and greatest thing that ever happened here,” he said, adding that it was “marvelous” to see the breakdown of old class divisions.

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Dan Levy swerves to simple.

Mr. Levy, the actor-writer-director, had blown into the suite all smiles and spray-on sunshine. Yesterday he’d gotten his first ever fake tan for the event.

Did it bother him, he was asked, that bronzing chemicals sometimes leave one smelling like a Waffle House breakfast special? “That’s not such a bad thing in the right circ*mstances,” he said.

The outfit that the Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson had created for Mr. Levy hung by a vase of yellow tulips on a nearby rack. A deceptively simple pair of what appeared to be floral print trousers and a double-breasted black jacket with a matching pattern edging the hem and cuffs was in fact a trompe l’oeil feat of embroidered “caviar” beading adapted from a creation in Loewe’s fall women’s wear show.

Back in 2021, when Mr. Levy made his initial foray onto the Met’s red carpet, he also wore Loewe. It was one of those get-ups calculated to break the internet, which it did. That particular outfit, adapting two AIDS-political works by the artist David Wojnarowicz, evoked a “gay superhero” clad in a maximalist tumult of hand-beading, world-map colors, parachute sleeves and a quilted image across the chest of two men kissing.

“We went big last time,” Mr. Levy said. “This time we wanted a swerve to simple.”

Anyone familiar with Mr. Levy’s work as the creator of “Schitt’s Creek” and the gay rom-com “Good Grief,” knows he loves fashion and also that he instinctively understands its importance in establishing character. “Sometimes I’ll be watching a scene and think, ‘If only they’d chosen a better outfit, they could have done without a whole long monologue,’” he said.

Initially working with a limited budget for “Schitt’s Creek,” he sourced most of the costumes himself on the internet. “It was a lot of McQueen, a lot of Ghesquière-era Balenciaga bought on eBay and Yoox,” he said.

Mr. Levy, 40, grew up a closeted gay kid in Toronto and, as many others like him have, recognized instinctively that fashion had the potential to provide an expressive language for things he was not yet able to say about himself.

“All those things I didn’t get to do then I can do now,” he said, once the Loewe team had fitted the first look onto his lean frame and then switched over to some bondage-y after-party trousers. “For the longest time, men’s fashion was so square. Women had all the fun. That all changed over the past 10 years, so now I’m leaning into everything playful, flamboyant and exciting.”

Pamela Anderson on Her Met Gala Debut: ‘I Am Playing Me’

“I feel like everything has led me to this pinnacle moment where I get to be at the Met, being respected and accepted by Anna Wintour,” Ms. Anderson said before the gala. She was in a hotel room at the Lowell, getting ready for a dress fitting. “I can imagine that in the past I was not someone she would ever take a second look at. I wasn’t in fashion, ever. I wasn’t cool. And I know those things may seem really superficial to some people, but it means a lot to me. I think I’m ready to meet her now.”

“I’m terrified,” she continued. “But that’s my happy place.”

This was the final step in a hero’s journey that wound through the gantlet of “Baywatch,” multiple marriages, a public shaming, a cultural reckoning and the redemption of a book, a documentary and a Broadway show.

It was one that took her from mostly taking off her clothes and being the face of Labatt’s beer to sitting in the front rows of Paris Fashion Week and being a face of Proenza Schouler. And one that has made her, over the last year, a fashion darling. The style set loves nothing so much as a makeover, especially of its own perceptions. The Met was simply the coronation.

“I’ve had this kind of rock ’n’ roll wild existence,” Ms. Anderson said. “But I always knew that this person was inside me. This lady. I’m like, ‘Oh, there you are.’”

Fernando Garcia, co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta, the fashion house that dressed Ms. Anderson for the gala, put it this way: “This is her coming into herself.”

So what does this new version of Pamela Anderson look like?

“She is a fairy in the forest,” Mr. Garcia said. Those are “the words we keep repeating to ourselves.” “We” being Ms. Anderson, Mr. Garcia and his co-creative director, Laura Kim; the forest being Ms. Anderson’s home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia (where, she wrote in her memoir, her grandfather used to place little mirrors in the garden to get a glimpse of fairies) and the fashion world. Which is not a bad metaphor.

There was no stylist involved. Ms. Anderson does not have one. (Neither, she said, did she work with a ghost writer on her memoir, “Love, Pamela,” published in 2023.) “I’m still trying to do it my way,” she said. “Not being controlled, or managed. When I look back, I hate to say this, but when I worked with a stylist, those are my least favorite looks. Working with a designer directly, though — I love that.”

Ms. Anderson said she was happy to follow the lead of Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim after they invited her to the gala, in part because they have developed something of a specialty in re-inventing their celebrity guests for the event; seizing the moment of peak eyeball to make the watching world see famous figures they think they know in a new light.

It was Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim who transformed Billie Eilish into a Marilyn Monroe va-va-voom figure in 2021; Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim who made Kaia Gerber into a doppelgänger for Bianca Jagger crossed with Grace Kelly that same year, causing Vogue to praise her “pure elegance.” They have famously dressed Celine Dion (as an Erté-esque Ziegfeld girl) and Nicki Minaj (as a scarlet woman). They have been so effective at Met dressing that it has essentially replaced the regulation runway for them.

To create the ethereal look they had in mind for Ms. Anderson, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim designed a beige crinkled chiffon gown, micro-pleated at the waist with one strap just slipping off the shoulder and a two-yard train that drifted out behind.

The idea, Mr. Garcia said, was to suggest that Ms. Anderson had wakened one morning, slipped on a nymphlike dress and gone on a romp through the woods. Along with the dress, they had a headpiece created by Noel Stewart to mimic pieces of grass that might have stuck in Ms. Anderson’s hair, and they draped about 227 carats of lab-grown Pandora diamonds (Ms. Anderson is a face of Pandora) across her collarbone to represent raindrops.

“You might have to sew them on to me,” Ms. Anderson said during the fitting, which was at the de la Renta offices on 42nd street. “It’s OK. I’ve been through worse.”

Oh, and she was wearing (light) makeup again, thanks to Pat McGrath, and Orlando Pita did her hair. “My mother will be so happy,” Ms. Anderson said.

“I really do feel like a princess,” she continued. “Or like a tree spirit. I don’t know, maybe a gnome? It’s just so elegant. So sophisticated. All those things that we aspire to be and fall short of. I feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, if this is the last picture ever taken in my life, I’m happy.’”

In a way, she has been preparing for it since she decided to wipe her face clean of makeup, bare her soul to the world in her documentary and memoir, and take control of her own story. Thinking, she said, “if I’m good enough for my dogs and my garden, good enough for the grocery store, then I’m good enough to go walk on a red carpet without a stitch of makeup on. It was very freeing.”

Women, she said, have come up to her on the street to thank her. “I thought, ‘I’m just waiting for my next incarnation,’” she said. “I don’t mind being the experiment.”

In the past, she said, she had “tried to dress like a grown-up when I wasn’t there yet. I just didn’t know how to put it all together.” She has some old Yves Saint Laurent and Alaïa, along with a bunch of “rubber dresses,” in storage bins back on Vancouver Island, where she lives with her two Labradors, one golden retriever, and a 5,000-square-foot vegetable and rose garden. Her parents live in another cabin on the property. At her Met fitting she joked that she had gone “from pickles to pearls.” (She does a lot of pickling.) “That’s your next book,” said Brandon Thomas Lee, the older of her two sons, who was with her in New York.

Ms. Anderson, who was going straight from the Met to Atlanta, where she is about to start filming a remake of “The Naked Gun” with Liam Neeson, and who still writes a weekly newsletter called “The Open Journal,” giggled.

“I’ve had another kind of image for so long, but that was almost a caricature,” she said. “People wear Halloween costumes of some of the looks I’ve created. So I think that’s a compliment, kind of. Jeff Koons used to tell me, ‘You walk out the door, it’s performance art.’ I’ve been playing characters my whole life. Now I am playing me.”