For her girl-about-town outfits, Blake loves to wallpaper herself in head-to-toe runway look, like all those times she’d dash around in a heavy, layered Ralph Lauren or Michael Kors suit ensemble styled fairly identically from the catwalk version. Sergio Hudson’s monochrome wintry separates seem tailor-made for her aesthetic, so it’s not a surprise to see her in this. Unfortunately I think this would have looked better if she were not moving. The coat blowing open puts a lot of focus on that shirt, which is extremely awkward and frankly a little distracting. I assume it’s a bodysuit, but keeping that thing in place looks potentially fussy and annoying. This ensemble is A Look in and of itself; it didn’t need to amp up the difficulty level.
Blake is co-hosting Monday night’s Met Gala, which has two themes going on: The actual exhibit is “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” which is Part II of September’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” but Anna has set a dress code that she’s calling “Gilded Glamour.” I can’t remember at time when attendees were given a specific code that didn’t just involve interpreting the exhibit’s theme, so who the heck knows what’ll happen — but after everyone was shocked as hell to see so few American designers represented in September, I would not be surprised if Blake deviated from Versace, Armani, and Gucci (her most common Met partnerships) and wore someone homegrown. And not for nothing, she’s worn a LOT of Sergio Hudson in just the last two months: a little black dress, a very little purple dress, a sexy purple jumpsuit situation, and the tangerine suit above, all of which stand out a bit more when you consider she only went to two other events in 2022 (The Adam Project’s premiere — in Versace — and Michael Kors’s show, unless I’m missing one). Hudson is a buzzy designer, to be sure, and would be a smart choice for an event host looking to contribute to the dialogue about American fashion from within; I guess we’ll know soon enough.
By the by: If you’re itching to look back at old Met Gala looks, you can go up into our masthead and click on “Biggies,” and then Met Gala is on that list. That’ll give you every Met post we’ve ever done, in reverse chronological order, so newest first. (In May 2020, we did extensive retrospectives on literally all of them, so they’ll be fairly close to the top.) If you are hankering for a specific year, you can start with this link to the 2021 ensembles and then click into the URL bar and replace the year with the one you actually want. Enjoy!
[Photo: Robert Kamau, Getty Images]
