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Athletes have the Olympics, actors have the Oscars and those in the fashion industry have the annual Met Gala, for which months upon months of preparation goes into each and every aspect of their look ahead of taking to the iconic Met steps.
This year, there was much debate after Kim Kardashian revealed she crash dieted and lost a total of 7kgs in just three weeks so she could fit into Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress, which she wore for the red carpet only, before changing into a replica for the rest of the evening.
Now, Bella Hadid has revealed that her look, designed by Riccardo Tisci at Burberry, which was made up of a black leather corset embellished with side chains, tulle sleeve gloves, floral-embellished sheer tights and a floor-sweeping lace train, was so tight that, coupled with anxiety, she couldn’t breathe on the carpet.
In a recent interview with Interview magazine, Hadid revealed she used to feel “so much anxiety” ahead of the night, but that she’s now mostly able to “take a lot of pressure of” and enjoy it. “We spend a lot of time — designing the dress and with my glam team — figuring out the creative part before I actually get to the hotel on Met day,” she explained. “So by the time it’s Met day, we’re just like living, listening to music, dancing. But 20 minutes beforehand it gets kind of stressful, because I’m a Libra and I’m always late. I try to not be late, but I always am anyway.”
Hadid went on to detail the inspiration behind her look, which was made to fit in with this year’s Met Gala theme of Guilded Glamour. “I tried to limit it to the period from 1895 to 1903,” she said. “I really liked a lot of the ties and the big fabrics and the tulle and obviously the corsets and the bustiers, but we also wanted to make sure that it stayed very much Riccardo — very simplistic, but chic.”
Though beautiful and on theme, Hadid added the corset could have contributed to her basically running off the red carpet and away from cameras. “I literally like, blacked out,” she said. “I don’t even think I got one good photo on the red carpet. Now that I look back, I realise that people literally stand there for 20 minutes and they give. I looked once to the left, once to the right, and I ran up the stairs.”
She continued, “I don’t think I was out there for more than three minutes. I don’t know if that was my anxiety, or maybe the waist was giving cinch and I couldn’t breathe. I mean, there were probably a lot of things happening.”
Following the Met, Hadid shared a series of behind-the-scenes photos taken by her boyfriend Marc Kalman, showing her dressed in a vintage Jean Paul Gaultier dress that didn’t make the final cut for her look of the night but which she had to “take for a spin” anyway.
“That is Jean Paul Gaultier fall/winter 2004, but that was the original from the archives,” she said on Instagram. “The JPG team is just amazing with me, I feel so lucky. They let me go through and razzle dazzle their archive, and Gabi [Karefa-Johnson – Hadid’s stylist] slayed by somehow getting that from Paris to here, so I was like, ‘I can’t let her just go back to Paris without taking her for a spin.'”
