The week before the 2026 Met Gala, model Charlie Nishimura got a text from her agent: “Do you want to go to the Met with Madonna?” Her response: “Lol, sure, why not?”

Nishimura admits she was skeptical of the offer. “You don’t expect anything like that to happen,” she tells Vogue. “I didn’t hear anything for a couple of days. I thought it went by the wayside. And then on Friday they were like, ‘Okay, you're confirmed.’”

Three days later, Nishimura hit the Met Gala red carpet as one of Madonna’s seven ladies-in-waiting. With help from Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello and milliner Philip Treacy, the group paid homage to Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting The Temptation of St. Anthony. (Nishimura wore a sheer, greenish-white dress with nude lace from the French brand.)

Madge zeroed in on a sliver of the painting: a tableau of the Queen of Sheba, horn in hand, her stormy gray gown held up by attendants. “She talked about how the ship was a metaphor for how we move through life: Life is like a ship, and the gauzy cape became the sea,” Nishimura explains. And, as for the instrument, Madonna herself said it best: “Music brings the people together.”

“I think she did actually tell us that,” Nishimura adds.

Anyone who’s heard about the singer’s biopic bootcamp can expect that she was just as involved in her theatrical Met Gala look. “She cast it herself, which is very special to hear: Madonna has chosen you,” Nishimura says. “She’s very particular. We all had our pictures sent to her at the fitting, and she had to approve everything.”

“It always feels special to be chosen,” Nishimura adds. But it’s probably a little extra special when Madonna chooses you.

On Saturday, Nishimura and the six other models gathered at Madonna’s Manhattan home to prepare for the Met, where they met the singer for the first time. “She was extremely sweet. She’s a consummate professional and a true diva in the positive sense,” she says. “She had the gravitas and that professionalism that I think we all admire.”

Once the pop-star put on the cape and Philip Treacy hat (the milliner even FaceTimed in for the fitting), they got to work. “We rehearsed only four or so times, and we just assigned our spots,” Nishimura says.

On Monday, the group returned to Madonna’s house, where they got ready in her rehearsal space. “We were all oohing and ahhing over each other’s dresses,” she says. Then, a Sprinter van whisked them away to the Met, where they arrived between Bad Bunny and Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner.

By the time they arrived, “there was a huge queue of celebrities and designers and people waiting to still go up the steps,” Nishimura says, counting Marc Jacobs and Alexa Chung. But they breezed straight past the line. “Celebrity is sort of like Mount Olympus,” Nishimura says. “Madonna’s still a queen there, and we’re just her nymphs.”

The singer had the steps to herself for her five-minute performance, replete with a custom soundtrack. “It’s funny, I wasn’t nervous at all,” she says. “The moment wasn’t really about us. It was about us as a collective, which makes things a lot less scary.”

So what does one do after they’ve just escorted Madonna up the Met Gala steps? “We had to take the cape back down the steps,” she says. What happened next could send even the gods crashing down to earth: “At the end, Beyoncé turns the corner,” Nishimura says. “The photographer started screaming at us, ‘Get out of the shot, you’re ruining the shot!’”