I’m not sure if Chemena Kamali’s contingent of no-make-up-make-up girls felt all that obliged to dress “on-theme” at this year’s Met Gala, given Greta Gerwig, Zoe Saldaña, Emma Mackey, and Sienna Miller ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Art Museum in a series of Chloé gowns plucked from the brand’s most recent collection. There were no references to the Edenic gardens that Count Axel watches over in the JG Ballard novella that inspired this year’s dress code, “The Garden of Time”; nor were there the savage markings of the clock itself that the Met’s fashion exhibition so deftly explores.
But then again: the bohemian girl is perhaps the most legitimate approximation we have to true arcadian glamor—that which just about every other famous person thought to telegraph yesterday evening via florals, bracken, and sand-blasted dresses. Sienna Miller was one of the few guests that best embodied that barefoot attitude, posing before the paparazzi in a ruffled and lace-embroidered milkmaid gown of Kamali’s making. Being the original figurehead for the so-called “boho chic” movement during the aughts, Miller was among a handful of women that Kamali placed on the front lines of her debut catwalk back in March, wagging their legs—and the enormous wooden wedges that anchored them downward—in gleeful unison. Photographs of that moment have done just as much for Chloé’s perceived street cred as the Paddington bag did in 2004. (Read: a lot.)
It will help, too, that when the curtains fell on the 2024 Met Gala, Miller arrived at—or rather clonked down to—the after-parties in a pair of side-buttoned flares, a beatnik blouse, and those same hulking shoes. Proof of Miller’s enduring influence on style further revealed itself on Adwoa Aboah’s appearance at last night’s Met Gala, when the model debuted her baby bump in a stomach-baring two piece—designed by H&M—that bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain Schiaparelli look that surfaced on the red carpet at Vogue World: London in 2023. It wouldn’t be the first time that the high street has indebted itself to the bohemian mores of Sienna Miller’s wardrobe—and so, don’t be surprised, then, if just about every affordable label begins to market their own Herculean wedges in the weeks succeeding the Met Gala.
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Met Gala 2024: See Every Celebrity Arrival, Read the Latest Stories, and Get Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Here