The 2022 Met Gala was full of surprises, including an impromptu performance from Lizzo. But even the singer interrupted her own flute playing to praise Kim Kardashian as she arrived at the Met Gala red carpet.
The “Truth Hurts” singer walked the Met Gala red carpet on Monday wearing a golden hand-embroidered gown by Thom Browne. During the Vogue red carpet livestream of the event, Lizzo revealed that her dress took 22,000 hours to make. But what was even more impressive was the singer’s unexpected performance from the “rare” flute she carried with her, which was priced at $55,000.
As Lizzo — whose real name is Melissa Jefferson — played a tune for Met Gala attendees, she abruptly stopped her performance to react to Kim Kardashian, who was arriving at the event wearing Marilyn Monroe’s sheer bedazzled dress from 1962.
“It’s Kim Kardashian, y’all. F***! She look good as f*** too,” Lizzo said before walking up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kim Kardashian made her debut on the Met Gala red carpet with her boyfriend, comedian Pete Davidson, on Monday evening. The 41-year-old reality star was dressed in Marilyn Monroe’s iconic “Happy Birthday, Mr President” dress, which was worn by the actress when she serenaded President John F Kennedy on his 45th birthday in 1962.
The 60-year-old, multi-million-dollar gown has been on display at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in a darkened, temperature-controlled vault, which is kept at 40 to 50 per cent humidity. In order to preserve the dress, Kardashian changed into a replica shortly after posing on the Met Gala red carpet.
“I’m extremely respectful to the dress and what it means to American history,” she told Vogue. “I would never want to sit in it or eat in it or have any risk of any damage to it and I won’t be wearing the kind of body makeup I usually do.”
Conservationists also assisted Kardashian into the dress while wearing white hand gloves. No alterations were to be made to the $4.8m dress, which meant it must perfectly fit Kardashian.
“I said, ‘Give me, like, three weeks,’” Kardashian recalled to livestream co-host La La Anthony, before claiming that she lost 16 pounds to fit into the dress. “It was such a challenge, it was like a role. I was determined, I was determined to fit.”
The theme of the 2022 Met Gala event was “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” which acted as part two of the exhibit, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion”. This year, the annual fashion event returned to its traditional date of the first Monday in May, after the pandemic cancelled the event in 2020, and lockdown orders in New York City switched the spring event to September 2021.