It was even harder than you may have imagined for Kim Kardashian to be still and camera-ready during the Met Gala 2024 on Monday, especially with her gorgeous silver Maison Margiela Artisanal by John Galliano costume.
In a recent Vogue video, the model is seen trying on the outfit, testing her hair and cosmetics days before the event, and showing off how she breathes through an impossible-to-fit corset. As the video opens, viewers see Kardashian taking deliberate breaths through pursed lips. She is asked how her “breathing is going.”
“It’s an art form, but I got it,” she replies.
Kardashian is making her 11th appearance at the Met Gala; each time, she has worn a different designer (she sardonically notes that at her first attendance, she was “a plus-one,” omitting the name of her ex-husband Kanye West). She clarified that by pursuing John Galliano directly for a collaboration, she truly meant that she had been “stalking him for four or five years to see if he would ever design a look for the Met.” She claimed to have done so.
Kardashian’s frigid appearance for the “Garden of Time” dress code, which honored the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibit, made headlines. Her perseverance paid off. In order to evoke waking up in a garden after “literally the best night of your life,” she wore an overskirt of retooled silver, mirror fragments, crystals, chains, and more. Her corset, which had fashion enthusiasts wondering where her internal organs were hiding, was paired with thistle-washed cashmere cardigan.
It was one of those evenings where everything seemed to be going apart, so I’m just rushing and grabbing my boyfriend’s sweater to get me where I need to go,” she remarked. “That’s like really the real me, where real life happens, sometimes I’m wearing my makeup from the previous night, and it is what it is that I have to get home by 6 a.m. to get to carpool.”
She spent the entire night with her envisioned “most magical person” while wearing the corset, according to her vision.
“It enhances the appearance of my waist and boobs,” she remarked, staring at her mirror. Thus, “everything else fell apart.”
“I’m so infatuated that I can’t even begin to express to you how infatuated I feel,” she said to Galliano, ogling Kardashian’s attire while she worked on her “art form” of breathing.
A seemingly insignificant detail of the ensemble that highlights the pair’s devotion to the bit: Using the same silvery brocade, a special Margiela thong eliminates the possibility of an unintentional slip-up through the open-weave overskirt.
The footage also clarified Kardashian’s peculiar walk on the green carpet at the Met: The actress seemed like she was straining to move, and it wasn’t just because of her ornate, form-fitting attire. Kardashian chose to wear heel-less Pleaser heels, resting on her tiptoes atop a tall clear platform beneath the ball of her foot, to prevent a distracting footwear choice and to avoid a spike heel catching in one of the skirt’s openings. Kardashian is approximately 5’2″ tall when standing flat-footed, and she thinks that she is slightly under 6 feet tall when wearing the dangerous heels in the video. All night long, she was truly standing on her tiptoes, her calves contracted, unable to lean back.
“I think ballerinas do it and they have a lot of practice. This is our only practice, but we’ll do it,” she said gamely.
With Vanity Fair’s coverage of the Met Gala 2024, you can relive all the looks, see who dressed the best, find out what the evening’s theme was, and stay up to date on every detail from the largest night in fashion.