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 do—from a place of wonder. “It always begins with the theme, and what curiosities it sparks in me,” he said. “And this one began with a curiosity about classical sculpture, and, well, really the multifigure classical sculpture.” While it would have been easy enough to merely 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 to be a body in that sculpture, to live in that sculpture?”

The process included around a dozen sketches or so to get the secondary, “shadow” figure’s frozen pose just right, an embrace that will change in meaning depending on which angle you’re seeing Roth. “The ability to really dance together and have a story that evolves was crucial,” he said. This required numerous Zoom meetings, fittings, and trials to make sure that both the dress—made from a flowing stretch velvet with an irridescent sheen that resembles the delicate drapes of fabric as they are 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.”

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 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.

Additionally, this look slyly references one of Roth’s favorite works held at the Met: Pygmalion and Galatea by the 19th-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. The image depicts the sculpture Galatea in the moment she was brought to life by the goddess Venus, fulfilling the desire of her maker, Pygmalion, to have a wife as beautiful as his own creation. “It is the blur,” Roth says. “It’s a moment of transformation between art and life. And it is a moment of transcendence between artist and art.”

As you might expect, no detail was left to fate for Roth’s look—including covering the sculpture in a flocked fabric to exactly match his dress, and even covering his own Rick Owens boots in the same material, in case a hint of shoe emerges from the undulating folds of his resplendent gown. Gloves are built into the gown as well, and Wun even made nails of the same flocked textiles, plus earrings. “It all blends into the dress,” Roth says. “And so, again, the idea is that the sculpture body and the flesh body are interchangeably, inextricably, interconnected.”

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