Cardi B’s Met Gala Ball Gown Is So Big That It Swallowed the Steps of the Museum

Of course, she topped off the look with magnificent emerald and diamond jewels

preview for The Best Met Gala Looks Ever

Cardi B has done it once again.

Tonight, the rapper arrived at fashion’s biggest night in an outfit that’s sure to top Met Gala best-dressed lists everywhere. The centerpiece of her look was a voluminous black tulle ball gown—a piece so large that it quite literally swallowed the entirety of the Metropolitan Museum’s staircase. She accented the massive dress with diamond and emerald jewelry, which came in the form of huge drop earrings, a massive necklace, and a bedazzled bracelet.

cardi b

GETTY IMAGES

cardi b

GETTY IMAGES

cardi b

GETTY IMAGES

Cardi is known for her showstopping Met Gala looks. She last attended in 2023, when she honored the year’s Karl Lagerfeld-dedicated theme in an incredible a Chenpeng Studio-designed ballgown, which featured a structured quilted skirt covered in massive black rosettes.

cardi b

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This year’s dress code is “The Garden of Time,” a concept inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of the same name. In essence, the theme examines the intrinsic connection between time and natural beauty—leaving the door wide open for attendees to interpret the dress code as they please.

“The Garden of Time” also complements the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which will include about “250 objects spanning four centuries” from the Institute’s vast collection, all of them “visually united by iconography related to nature, which will serve as a metaphor for the fragility and ephemerality of fashion,” according to a press release. The exhibition will feature a number of modern technologies in its display, too, “from cutting-edge tools, artificial intelligence, and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes.”