Fans react to Tyla’s Met Gala transformation: ‘Seamless and perfectly aligned’
Tyla was able to swiftly change her dress following the 2024 Met Gala red carpet.
On Monday 6 May, the singer showed up to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for the biggest night in fashion to celebrate The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibit, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”. Attendees followed the dress code of “The Garden of Time” after JG Ballard’s 1962 book of the same name.
For her outfit, the “Water” singer looked like the fairytale character the Sandman as she wore a Balmain gown that was covered in real sand meant to represent the “sands of time,” in addition to an hourglass that she carried around in lieu of a purse.
The gown was so form-fitting that she struggled to walk up the stairs and had to be carried by an assistant while two others held the back of the dress.
When asked about being carried up the stairs in an interview with Access Hollywood, she said: “Guys, that’s the only way I’m getting up the stairs. That’s the only way.”
Soon after, the fashion house’s creative director Olivier Rousteing altered the dress for her to be able to move more comfortably in it, cutting the train off the dress until it reached her upper thigh and turning it into a mini dress.
Rousteing showed the freehand alteration he did on the dress in an Instagram post that he captioned: “And what you didn’t see … inside the MET.”
Many people took to the post’s comment section, where they expressed how impressed they were with making such a clean cut with no extra tools to help him aside from a pair of scissors.
“Stunning but also how he made that cut so perfectly,” one comment began. “I would make it look like a kindergarten and my line would be all over the place.”
Another commenter agreed, writing: “How the f*** was a cloth line cut freehand so f***ing neat.”
“How seamless and perfectly aligned is that cut. Here I can’t even cut a paper straight,” a third commenter gushed over the altered design.
Other commenters were disappointed to see the dress cut at all.
“You cut it?!?! That beautiful work of art??!” one comment read, while another person agreed, writing: “I would never cut that dress.”
To create the dress, Rousteing explained to The Hollywood Reporter that they used a plaster mould and three different shades of sand with micro-crystal studs to create the look they wanted.
“We moulded [Tyla’s] body a couple months ago. The idea was she could dress once in the dress and it would be part of the museum,” he told the outlet. “What is sleeping beauty? ‘Sleeping Beauty’ for me [means] you can dress once in a lifetime.”
“The inspiration behind this creation stemmed from a desire to redefine boundaries and transform a transient material into an everlasting masterpiece,” Rousteing, who has been Balmain’s creative director for over a decade, told Vogue about the dress.
“The idea of sculpting a garment from something as ephemeral as sand ignited my imagination, and I could not be happier with the end result.”
