Emma Chamberlain is no Met Gala rookie. Tonight is the internet multihyphenate’s sixth time both attending and serving as Vogue’s special correspondent on the red carpet, and she’s more locked in than ever.

“I’m taking it really seriously in a way that I feel like I haven’t in the past,” she tells Vogue two days before the event. Instead of going to every pre-Met party (and there are many), she saved her energy by staying in. “I just want to be as peaceful as possible and rest,” she says. It was all in preparation for a night of interviewing the world’s biggest stars for Vogue’s livestream—and doing so wearing what may be her most personal Met Gala look to date.

For the Met Gala 2026, Chamberlain is wearing custom Mugler by Miguel Castro Freitas, whom she and her stylist, Jared Ellner, met at Paris Fashion Week on the eve of the creative director’s debut spring/summer 2026 show. Chatting for over an hour at a Vogue cocktail event, the three became fast friends. And after taking in the show, Chamberlain knew Mugler would be the perfect choice for the Met. Then, when they heard the dress code was “Fashion is Art,” everything clicked.

“I’m somebody who really believes that fashion is art,” Chamberlain says. In envisioning her look, she took inspiration from her family and her lifelong love of art. “My dad is an oil painter and a watercolor painter, and I grew up in a very creative household with paintings all over my house,” she says. For Chamberlain, paintings—and paint itself—are nostalgic and comforting. She and Ellner wanted her gown to feel like a painting and to incorporate some of the textures, colors, and themes of some of her favorite works.

“There is sort of this watercolor feel, and I love watercolor painting,” she says. “But then also there’s a creepy, sort of ominous undertone to the gown, like the way that it moves. And that is very much my taste in art.”

To begin the custom design process, Chamberlain and Ellner sent art references (including works by Van Gogh and Munch) to Freitas and the Mugler team, then had a three-hour conversation to talk through ideas. Ellner also selected archival Mugler looks as influences, including a butterfly dress from 1997. When Freitas sent them the initial sketch, Chamberlain and Ellner had virtually no notes.

The result is a stunning gown, designed by Freitas and hand-painted by artist Anna Deller-Yee, that literally turns Chamberlain’s body into a canvas. It’s a feeling she loves. “I really am someone who enjoys fashion the most when I get to be a complete blank canvas,” she says.

When it came to her glam for the evening, “We had some big, brave ideas of what I’d do,” she says, including dyeing her hair brown. But at the end of the day, she felt that the “gown was very much made for me as I am.” At the end of the day, she says: “I’m loving me looking like me in this gown.”

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