Six of the eleven looks on this list come from that single evening, which makes 2019 the runaway winner in this category by a wide margin.
The reason traces back to the Costume Institute’s official dress code that year, Camp: Notes on Fashion, curated by Andrew Bolton and built around Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp. Sontag defined camp as a sensibility that favors artifice, exaggeration, and theatrical excess over restraint, and guests took that permission slip and ran with it, treating irony and spectacle as the actual dress requirement rather than a loose suggestion.
The results ranged from functioning chandeliers to literal severed heads, and none of it would have made sense under any other year’s theme. Here is the full, gloriously overbuilt record, from a dress nicknamed after breakfast food to a corset engineered by a man with an 18-inch waist of his own.
Rihanna’s 2015 Yellow Cape Gown
Rihanna closed out the 2015 China Through the Looking Glass gala by arriving last. That gave her the entire grand staircase to herself in a fur-trimmed yellow cape by Guo Pei. The gown took two years and roughly 6,000 hours to embroider. It weighed about 55 pounds and required three handlers to manage its train as it swept across the steps.
Within hours, the internet had reworked the silhouette into fried eggs, pizza, and rotisserie chicken. That reaction spawned the nickname the omelette dress, a label that still outlives most red carpet moments from that decade.
Guo Pei, then an obscure Beijing-based couturier, became the first Chinese designer admitted as a guest member of the Paris Haute Couture Federation that same year. Her career pivot started with one pop star’s fitting.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s 2013 and 2015 Headpieces
Long before headline-grabbing gowns became routine, Sarah Jessica Parker was quietly building a personal tradition out of Philip Treacy headpieces. Subtlety never entered the equation. For the 2013 punk-themed gala, she wore a towering mohawk built entirely from feathers and wire.
Two years later she returned in a flame-shaped red and silver headdress, paired with a poppy-embroidered gown sewn from scraps H&M’s sustainability team dug out of storage in Sweden. Parker described the 2015 piece as light and comfy to wear.
That did nothing to stop the internet from comparing it to a Power Rangers villain. Few guests have treated the Met steps as a running bit the way she has, one silhouette at a time, year after year.
Solange’s 2018 Durag and Halo
For the 2018 Heavenly Bodies gala, Solange Knowles let her fans vote on her outfit over Twitter. The winning combination paired a sculpted black Iris van Herpen latex gown from the designer’s 2012 couture collection with a gold halo worn directly over a durag.
According to PAPER, the durag underneath was embroidered with the words ‘my god wears a durag’. It read as a quiet rewrite of the night’s religious dress code, devotional rather than provocative.
Solange completed the look with thigh-high boots and a small net bag holding obsidian and Agua de Florida. Both objects tied to spiritual cleansing traditions rather than costume-department flourish.
The styling turned a Catholic imagination theme into a statement about whose imagination usually gets left out of it.
Cardi B’s 2019 Feathered Thom Browne Gown
Cardi B’s 2019 entrance took longer to build than most film costumes. Thom Browne’s team logged roughly 2,000 hours and enlisted 35 people to complete a wine colored gown trimmed in 30,000 burned and dyed coque feathers, finished with a 10-foot train patterned like stacked down pillows.
A bugle bead headpiece by milliner Stephen Jones capped the look. Jeweler Corina Mihaila Larpin added a pair of 44-carat ruby accents worth a reported 250,000 dollars each. Seven assistants were needed just to walk the dress up the carpet without tangling the train.
Browne told Vogue the design was meant to showcase what he called the ultimate beauty in a woman’s body, a callback to the era’s ongoing fights over which bodies get treated as couture worthy in the first place.
Billy Porter’s 2019 Sun God Ensemble
Before Billy Porter ever touched the red carpet in 2019, he was already airborne. Six shirtless dancers in gold trousers carried him to the Met’s entrance on a velvet litter. The concept began as a joke about recreating Diana Ross’s five-outfit Mahogany montage.
Porter and his team eventually narrowed it down to a single Egyptian sun god ensemble by The Blonds, complete with a bejeweled catsuit, 10-foot wings, and a 24-karat gold headpiece. Porter later explained the entrance simply, telling Playbill that camp is the art of being extra.
This was fashion’s most theatrical entrance in the event’s history, which has held up remarkably well against six more years of competition.
Katy Perry’s 2019 Chandelier and Burger Looks
Katy Perry treated the 2019 carpet like a two-act play. She opened in a 40-pound Moschino gown built as a fully functioning chandelier, complete with Swarovski crystals and bulbs that actually lit up as she climbed the museum steps.
Moschino’s creative director Jeremy Scott told Vogue that elegance itself struck him as inherently campy. He joked that no one has ever been to a ball without a chandelier.
Perry then vanished into a bathroom and reemerged in a second look, a 3D hamburger dress complete with a lettuce underlayer, crystalline sesame seeds, and a toothpick-shaped headpiece.
Two costume changes in one carpet walk turned what could have been a single punchline into a genuine study of camp as concept rather than accessory.
Jared Leto’s 2019 Severed Head Accessory
Jared Leto’s 2019 look leaned on a runway reference most guests missed entirely. It pulled from Gucci’s Fall 2018 show, where models carried lifelike replicas of their own heads down the catwalk under creative director Alessandro Michele.
Leto, a longtime Gucci muse, wore a blood-red silk robe with a crystal harness and carried an exact match of his own head, produced by the Italian effects house Makinarium at a reported cost of $ 11,000. He spent the evening posing with it and passing it to fellow guests, including Shawn Mendes.
It reportedly went missing months later and was never recovered. The bit worked because it doubled as brand history, referencing a runway moment that had already gone viral as its own meme a year earlier under the hashtag GucciChallenge.
Lady Gaga’s 2019 Four Look Reveal
Lady Gaga did not simply wear an outfit to the 2019 gala. She staged one. Designer Brandon Maxwell walked beside her as she began in a voluminous hot pink cape gown with a 25-foot train, flanked by five men holding black umbrellas despite clear skies.
She then peeled off layer after layer, revealing a strapless black ballgown, then a fitted hot pink column dress accessorized with a novelty brick-sized cell phone, and finally a crystal bra and panty set with platform boots.
Variety reported the singer wore roughly 2 million dollars in Tiffany diamonds throughout the sequence. Anna Wintour reportedly watched the entire reveal from the top of the stairs with her hands clasped, visibly delighted. That reaction tells you everything about how the night’s actual dress code worked in practice.
Kim Kardashian’s 2019 Wet Look Mugler Corset
For the 2019 gala, Thierry Mugler broke a 20-year retirement to design a single custom look for Kim Kardashian.
The result was a silicone and crystal gown meant to mimic water dripping off skin, inspired by Sophia Loren’s soaked shirt in the 1957 film Boy on a Dolphin.
Getting into it required a corset built by Mr. Pearl, a corsetier famous for training his own waist down to a reported 18 inches over decades of daily wear.
In a behind-the-scenes Vogue video, during her fitting, she claimed she could only half sit for the rest of the night. Online commentary quickly spiraled into rumors that she had removed a rib to fit the silhouette, rumors she never directly confirmed or denied.
The look took eight months to construct and marked Mugler’s first design credit since 2003.
Zendaya’s 2019 Light Up Cinderella Gown
Zendaya’s 2019 entrance leaned fully into her Disney Channel origins. She arrived in a custom ice-blue Tommy Hilfiger gown wired with roughly 40 meters of LED lighting that shifted from grey to blue as her stylist, Law Roach, dressed as her fairy godmother, waved a wand over the fabric.
The technology came from the same team behind Hussein Chalayan’s mechanical Spring 2007 runway pieces, repurposed here for a single evening gown rather than a full collection. She carried a pumpkin-shaped Judith Leiber clutch and left one glass slipper on the steps as a parting detail.
Zendaya later admitted the technical build nearly failed hours before the event, telling British Vogue simply that ‘’this Met stressed me out’’.
It was a rare bit of honesty about how much engineering hides behind a costume that reads as effortless magic on camera.
Lil Nas X’s 2023 Silver Body Paint Look
Closing out the 2023 gala honoring Karl Lagerfeld, Lil Nas X skipped fabric almost entirely. He appeared in a bejeweled thong, platform boots, and a full-body coat of silver paint applied by makeup artist Pat McGrath in partnership with Dior Men.
Crystals and pearls were hand-placed across his skin to suggest a second skin rather than an accessory. The look finished with a whiskered cat mask referencing Lagerfeld’s famously pampered cat Choupette, a theme several other guests, including Jared Leto and Doja Cat, also chased that night in wildly different directions.
Whether it reads as body-positive minimalism or straightforward shock value depends entirely on which fashion critic you ask, and both camps have kept arguing about it since.
Key Takeaways
- 2019’s Camp theme produced six of the eleven weirdest looks in Met Gala history, more than any other year.
- Designers pushed materials past the usual limits, from a functioning chandelier gown to a corset built by a man with an 18-inch waist.
- Several looks doubled as tributes, referencing Diana Ross, Sophia Loren, Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, and Gucci’s own runway history.
- Craftsmanship hours ran high across the board, with Cardi B’s gown alone taking 2,000 hours and 35 people to build.
- The weirdest outfits tend to spark the same split reaction every time, read by some as art and by others as pure shock value.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information. It is not intended to be professional advice.
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