2026 Met Gala: Scrapbook Dress
My look incorporates a crêpe jacket with coin buttons overtop a tulle skirt with antique German paper die-cuts. These illustrated chromolithograph “scraps” were widely produced throughout the 1860s-1890s, used for everything from calling cards and craft projects to scrapbooking and confectionery decoration. Occasionally, the Victorians’ love for scrapbooking found its way into “fancy dress,” the period term for costume parties or themed balls. These costumes could be as varied as “a telegraph,” “champagne,” “Monte Carlo,” or even, “a scrap album,” covered in tiny paper cutouts. One such Scrap Album dress, circa 1893, hangs preserved in the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.
The antique scrapbook cutouts are carried down to the shoes, which are finished with hand-made bullion bows. I carried an antique bag made of cascading mother-of-pearl shells.
Crafted entirely by hand in our studio from antique and vintage materials sourced from @eBay . A sincere thank you to the incredible Bode team for bringing this to life.
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Joe Burrow (@joeyb_9 ) wears a custom Bode suit embellished with handmade frog closures, a style of ornament borrowed from historical smoking jackets, a type of men’s lounge jacket from which the tuxedo was developed. The midnight blue wool references the first garment historians consider a “tuxedo,” a deep blue dinner jacket commissioned by the Prince of Wales.
This suit design is grounded in the concept of the “Classical Body,” for which we looked to the Grand Manner style popular in early American portraiture. Grand Manner painters depicted their subjects in the poses of Greco-Roman sculpture—athletes, gods, and public leaders. The suit is embellished with passementerie from that early American period: Victorian mourning trim around the lapels and early 19th-century jet beadwork down the side seams of the trousers.
Thank you to our wonderful team for their work bringing this piece to life.
@SZA wears custom Bode for the 2026 Met Gala, a design inspired by the Wiener Werkstätte, the turn-of-the-century Viennese art collective whose work advanced both the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements. Their fashion department was sought after for its artistic and avant-garde clothing and accessories.
The bold yellow color and full, sweeping skirt are inspired by Werkstätte fashion plates in the collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artisans at the Werkstätte pulled their references from all eras, considering hoop-skirt designs from the 1800s equally as timeless as slim 1920s silhouettes.
Beadwork and materials, like the floral appliqués cut from remnants of fabric, were sourced from eBay. The tiered skirt is sewn with cowrie shells and European beaded flowers from the Edwardian period, indicative of Emily and SZA’s love for global handcraft. Hand-painted butterfly wings and beaded quartz crystal cuffs along the arms are inspired by antique French burlesque costumes, c.1910s. Finishing the look is a handmade crown trimmed with fresh flowers, inspired by the floral bouquets ordered each morning by the Werkstätte.
This project was supported by @voguemagazine and by Bode’s longtime relationships with vintage and antiques dealers on @ebay . Thank you to @brianaandalore and our tireless team for their incredible work in bringing this hand-made garment to life. Shop more of Emily’s eBay favorites at ebay.com/emilyadamsbodeaujla
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As I considered the history of art and the dressed body in the lead-up to the 2026 Met Gala and the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, I have been studying the output of the Wiener Werkstätte, a design collective founded in Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century. Made up of hundreds of artists, craftsmen, and designers, the Werkstätte grew up out of the Arts and Crafts movement. It was dedicated to bringing artistry and function to everyday objects, from furniture and flower vases to textiles and fashion design.
The Werkstätte drew inspiration from the natural world and from diverse other sources, including some that inspire much of my design for Bode, like folk art and domestic craft. Over its thirty years of operation, the firm became a key influence in both the Art Nouveau and the Art Deco movements, pushing forward art and design on an international scale.
The influence of the “Classical Body” has echoed throughout design history, recurring symbolically in a wide range of movements and styles. In America, classical influences formed the foundation for our first major works of art, specifically American portraiture.
The first major portraitists in the United States practiced a style called the “Grand Manner,” derived from aesthetic styles popular in Britain and on the continent. Grand Manner style was based on classical Greco-Roman art and Italian Renaissance painting and characterized by opulent, symbolic settings. In America, the style was used to give a sense of history and prestige to the leaders and statesman of the new republic.
Stylistically, Grand Manner portraits are typically arranged in a classical manner, using poses derived from sculptures of athletes and Greco-Roman gods. Some of these poses were even given names—the adlocutio pose, the heroic pose, or the contrapposto pose—and were intended, along with the style of painting, to show the subject’s virtue, power, and strength.
At the studio, we have been collecting Victorian “scraps,” a style of die-cut paper cards produced mostly between the 1860s-1890s. Made in all sorts of shapes, from flowers to animals to Greek deities, they play a distinct role in the history of costume, Victorian fancy dress, and decoration.
Antique scraps are representative of the Victorians’ ornamental decorative tastes, as well as the popular 19th-century craze for scrapbooking, though they were also used as calling cards, postcards, advertising, and craft projects . . . even used by confectioners to decorate cakes.
