There are a few celebrities you can rely on to fully embrace the Met Gala theme each year and one of them is Doja Cat. Her red carpet moments on the first Monday in May have included feline prosthetics for the 2023 Karl Lagerfeld extravaganza (she was inspired by the designer’s famous cat, Choupette) and the wet look T-shirt dress by Guram Gvasalia for Vetements that she slipped into for a playful twist on 2024’s “The Garden of Time” dress code.
Fresh off the back of her first American Vogue cover, however, Doja wanted to up the ante once again. On Vogue’s April cover, she wore jewel-toned Saint Laurent by Antony Vaccarello tailoring and her team, including her longtime stylist Brett Alan Nelson, clearly decided that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Yes, Doja’s look at the 2026 Met Gala is also a Saint Laurent design - the French fashion house is also one of the night’s key sponsors but it also couldn’t be more different than the ’80s-inspired power suiting she wore in her Vogue cover shoot. In contrast to some of her more provocative looks in years past, Doja’s homage to this year’s red carpet theme of “Fashion Is Art” (and the museum exhibition that accompanies it, which examines the myriad ways in which fashion and different types of human bodies interact) showcased a more elegant side of her style. (As part of her Vogue cover profile, the musician noted that she’s recently been gravitating towards sleeker, more minimalist labels, as opposed to the more kaleidoscopic looks of her earlier career.)
“I’m excited for this year’s Met Gala because I really love the theme and I feel like me and my glam [team] have definitely got it in the bag for this one,” Doja tells Vogue, noting that she and Vaccarello were especially drawn to the ancient Greek statues housed in the Met’s collection and that notably feature as part of the exhibition. “I think that the reference we were most connected with was the way fabric draped over the body of a Grecian statue can be so timeless,” she adds, explaining that they transformed that reference into a gown with a dramatic thigh slit. “I really loved the way that this dress draped over my body.”
Of course, it came with a suitably subversive, Doja Cat-worthy twist: the tan fabric, which first appeared as a kind of latex, was actually silicone. “It drapes really interestingly, and it acts different to a latex,” Doja explains of the textile, which Vaccarello notably experimented with as part of the label’s fall 2026 collection. There, he cut it into glossy trench coats and applied a coating of it on lace to create a mesmerizing shimmer. “They were doing it only for tops and things like that, and I think just making it into a gown really made it more grand, extravagant, and fun,” Doja notes.
She and Nelson styled the look with a pair of Kiki platform mules - also made in silicone, naturally and a touch of sparkle courtesy of some dramatic Saint Laurent jewelry. “I love their jewelry so much, and I have it constantly with me when I’m on tour,” she says. And when it came to her beauty, she worked with her hairstylist JStayReady, who created a blonde full lace wig with extensions cut into long layers to add movement, using hot tools by Red and styling products by Kiss Colors & Care.
But her team was all in agreement that the main event had to be that silicone dress. “The dress is such a moment - we didn’t want to over accessorize it,” she adds. “We wanted to keep the jewellery beautiful and elegant, to tell a story.” The phrase they kept returning to? “Strong and powerful.”
This article was originally published on Vogue US.
