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SHIPWRECKED

What Was Madonna Carrying at the Met Gala?

Her extravagant look required seven assistants.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedMay 4, 2026, 10:21 PM EDT

UpdatedMay 4, 2026, 10:21 PM EDT

Updated May 4, 2026, 10:21 PM EDTPublished May 4, 2026, 10:21 PM EDT

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Madonna dressed as a work of art for the 2026 Met Gala, complete with several distinctive accessories.

The queen of pop, 67, entered the famous steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City surrounded by seven assistants.

While her dress, a black floor-length Saint Laurent number, was fairly simple, it was the rest of the singer’s look that stole the scene.

On her head, she wore a jaunty hat with a black bead-embellished shipwreck on top. From the ship fell a grayish-purple organza sheet held around her by a group of young women in slip dresses.

Around Madonna’s neck was a large silver pendant, and she covered her hands and arms with black opera gloves, swapping her purse for a golden hunting horn.

While her inspiration may not have been immediately clear to those unfamiliar with surrealist art, Vogue reported that Madonna took the 2026 Met Gala dress code “Fashion is Art” literally, basing her outfit on a work by the late painter Leonora Carrington.

The artwork in question, a 1945 oil painting titled “The Temptations of Saint Anthony Fragment II,” depicts a dark figure standing with a ship on their head and blowing into an object resembling a hunting horn.

The character’s cape-like dress is held in a circle by multiple colorful characters, and the surreal piece also features a creature with a goat’s head that creates a river by pouring water from a ceramic vase.

Madonna has been inspired by Carrington before, as she was also one of the inspirations for Madonna’s out-of-this-world 1995 music video for her song “Bedtime Story.”

While Madonna’s take on the artwork was mostly literal, unlike in the painting, her assistants’ eyes were covered with see-through pieces of organza.

They also wore spaghetti-strapped slip dresses in muted colors, rather than the brightly colored long-sleeved dresses in the painting.

To make her gothic look even darker, Madonna wore a black wig that reached her hips.

The wig’s creator, Merria Dearman, told Vanity Fair that the custom wig was out of this world on purpose.

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“I would describe it as surreal. And I would say it’s f---ing Madonna. There’s nothing else to say other than it’s completely her world,” she told the outlet.

As a date, Madonna brought her 29-year-old boyfriend, Akeem Morris.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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