Jordan Roth Became a Living Sculpture in His Custom Robert Wun Outfit at the 2026 Met Gala

For seven-time Met Gala attendee Jordan Roth, each trip up the museum’s vaunted red-carpeted staircase is a chance to outdo his previous gauntlet-throwing displays of sartorial drama and whimsy. This year—his eighth—will be no different. To honor the exhibition’s theme, “Costume Art,” and the dress code, “Fashion is Art,” the theater producer and performer will be ensconced in a custom creation by London-based couturier Robert Wun: a slate gray velvet dress complete with a sculptural hanger-on attached to his back.

“It’s a deeply magical experience to live inside this piece,” Roth told Vogue recently.

Roth’s look started like most of his outré displays of fantastical fashion—from a place of wonder. “It always begins with the theme, and what curiosities it sparks in me,” he said. “This one began with a curiosity about classical sculpture—well, really the multifigure classical sculpture.” While it would have been easy enough to evoke a statue of a single figure—like the traditional Greek kouros, say—Roth wanted two bodies in conversation. “A solo figure is often posing for the viewer, but multiple figures are usually in some kind of heated moment—romance, love, lust, fear, violence. Something passionate is going on among these bodies.”

“And my curiosity was,” he continued, “what would it be like to be a body in that sculpture, to live in that sculpture?”

The process included a dozen or so sketches to get the secondary, “shadow” figure’s frozen pose just right—an embrace that will change in meaning depending from which angle you’re seeing Roth. “The ability to really dance together and have a story that evolves was crucial,” he said. Numerous Zoom meetings, fittings, and trials were needed to make sure that both the dress—made from a flowing stretch velvet with an iridescent sheen that resembles the delicate drapes of fabric as it’s rendered in stone—plus the molded being that is attached via a three-strap harness at the waist worked in tandem. “All the weight is carried at my hips, which is exactly how my Schiaparelli fan dress was structured.”

Photo: WWD / Getty Images

Roth explains that this is the second iteration of his sculpted shadow, as the first was too heavy to wear. And while the technicians who made the sculpture have crafted it from a lighter material now, Roth notes that the 3-D printed figure is still quite weighty (the price we pay for fashion, darling!), though it will be detached for the dinner portion of the evening. “I don’t want to be serving my neighbor’s soup to my sculpture!” Roth jokes.