Five Vogue editors, a stylist, a handful of assistants, one messenger, a publicist, a hotel electrician, and an It-girl model on the rise walk into a fitting room with a screw-on dress.
That is not the beginning of a joke, but the making of Amelia Gray Hamlin’s major 2024 Met Gala look. The model wore the Undercover, spring 2024 light-up terrarium dress by Jun Takahashi—its sister dress, in pink, is currently in the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibition at the Met. But spectacular as the moment was, it took quite a bit of work and many, many hands to pull off.
“Anything for Vogue, but damn, that was one of my harder gigs,” said Hamlin on the phone yesterday. “The right side of my body still hasn’t recovered, but it’s fine!” For context, the dress does not function like a regular frock—you can’t just zip it up. There’s a corset, an under dress, and then the encasing, which is split in half and screws on at the sides. The skirt has two circular windows through which the flowers inside can be arranged, and it all gets covered by two strips of tulle that come from the bottom of the encasing that have to be draped in a specific way before meeting the bustier. It’s an undertaking, for sure. “But it was a dream to wear and an honor to carry that torch,” said Hamlin. This is, after all, one of the most memorable dresses in recent memory. While Hamlin’s was not a live terrarium, the piece on the runway was a feat of ingenuity with its live plants and butterflies. Takahashi might have been working through his feelings of grief, but from his pain came something wonderful, and Hamlin at the Met gave it its rightful place in fashion history.