@louisa_jacobson in Dilara Couture for Met Gala “Costume Art”
Louisa wears a mini crinoline corset dress, embellished with antique Afghan and Victorian jewellery. The delicate silk train, composed of four mud stained dresses
As an artist whose work centres on celebrating and freeing the body, I wanted to take a different approach for this years MET theme. Here, the body is not only adorned, it is armoured. It becomes a shield, a survival mechanism shaped by the demands of a patriarchal world.
Through this look, I ask: can I exist in power without abandoning my vulnerability? Can I be both at once?
Styling @edward.bowleg
Hair @blakeerik
Make up @shaynagold
I realised early on that to exist in this world, I had to become something harder than I am. I saw how power — shaped in a masculine image — moved with more freedom, and I wanted access to it. So I built myself accordingly, layer by layer, into something closer to armor. Something legible. Something almost steel.
But over time, I began to question what had to be buried for that version of strength to exist. Real freedom does not begin in armor, and yet the world still asks for it — to harden, to translate ourselves into something the world recognises as strength. I resist that. Can I move through it without hiding the parts of myself that might be read as vulnerable? Can I be both? held in steel, yet soft within it? Can I stand in white, in fragility, and still be at my strongest?
My Spring Summer 26 collection, Cage of Innocence, was firstly about releasing myself from the invisible cages built around me by society, and secondly about setting my ancestors free from the rooms, rules, and roles they were forced in. They were kept within these walls so they could maintain their role as innocent and passive beings.
Who made these rules? Who built those walls? Through Cage of Innocence, I hope that I broke some of them.
The Girl in a Room dress is about a girl who was put in a cage against her will, controlled and restricted, as if the home is the only safe space for her. She’s wearing a soft, childlike, fragile dress, almost what she is meant to wear as a “good girl.” She’s being silenced, but she twists it.
I like twisting the norms.
She cuts it short so short that it’s almost a top, not a dress anymore. She slashes the cleavage open. She wants to be free. She’s not taking on the rules of society; her body is hers.
She becomes whatever she wants outside the room.
