Lizzo Drips in Pearls at the 2023 Met Gala After Critiquing Last Year’s Red Carpet
After attending Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s pre-Met Gala dinner last night in a simple violet dress with matching shades, Lizzo—fresh off announcing a few complaints about last year’s event—has arrived on the Met steps in a sleek black Chanel gown accented with a trailing pearl bodice. The “About Damn Time” singer paired the look with stacked bracelets and, as befits the theme of the evening, pearl Chanel earrings. She even took the time to honor the late Karl Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette—or, anyway, Jared Leto dressed as Choupette.
Last year, Lizzo donned a gorgeous hand-embroidered Thom Browne cape and corset gown for the Met’s “Gilded Glamour” theme, though all the gold belied her true feelings about the red carpet. As she revealed in an Instagram Live over the weekend, she found the pressure around the big reveal to be the “scariest part”—not to mention the least elegant.
“You gotta wait because, for everybody to have that individual moment on the stairs, if there wasn’t, like, a line, it would just be mobbed out,” she told her audience. “So you’re waiting, and that’s the hardest part because, bitch, I was sweating in my big-ass coat…can we get some chairs or some drinks or some hors d’oeuvres? But everybody else was kind of mixing and mingling. That was the scariest part of me, because after the carpet’s done, I’m the happiest bitch in the world.”
She also added that she felt “heckled” by the rows of photographers when it was finally her moment in front of the cameras. “I had this plan to play the flute and do the whole intro, but I got nervous and I only played it once because all the photographers were heckling me,” she said. “In my mind, I thought everyone was going to be transfixed. So I only played it once, only the first half of it. Then I posed and got the photos.”
Tonight, she appears more at ease on the carpet, though the Met would do well to heed her advice: a few more appetizers on the steps, please and thank you.
Culture Writer
Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE.
