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Sarah Jessica Parker is an all-time Met Gala MVP — and her look at the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit is even more proof.
On Monday night, SJP made her grand return to the Met Gala — marking her first time at the fashion fête since 2018. A self-proclaimed “stickler for the theme,” Parker, 57, dressed to impress while delivering a thoughtful interpretation of the “Gilded Glamour” dress code.
Parker, who hit the carpet solo as her Met plus-one Andy Cohen just welcomed daughter Lucy, teamed a custom black-and-white Christopher John Rogers ball gown with a show-stopping Philip Treacy headpiece — her signature Met Gala style move.
“This dress was really exquisite and pretty much fit the period of time that Andrew Bolton [head curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s Costume Institute] picked for this exhibit,” Parker told Vogue‘s Met Gala correspondent LaLa Anthony on the red carpet.
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She also opened up about the impact of American fashion and what the theme, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” means to her.
“I think it’s probably played a role in all of our lives. I think what’s interesting is about fashion is interpretation and so you might see an image and feel strongly inspired by or object to it or I might feel 100 different things that didn’t occur to you,” she shared. “I think what’s happened in fashion is that rules have been broken a little bit and that we don’t have to necessarily look like our neighbor or like our classmate or like the other mothers, or like our colleagues. So I think what’s happened is over time we’ve seen a little bit of deconstruction, but maybe more appreciation for the construction.”
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Parker teamed the gown with Fred Leighton jewelry and shoes from her own collection for her Cinderella moment.
Parker skipped the 2021 Gala because she was busy filming And Just Like That. In 2019, Parker and Cohen, 53, also skipped the event because of work complications. But her rolodex of Met fashion moments — and those meme-worthy headpieces — have left an indelible mark on fans.
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Perhaps her most polarizing headgear was the red flame Philip Treacy piece she wore in 2015 to interpret that year’s “China: Through the Looking Glass” theme, which famously got held up in customs until right before the event.
“We’ve had some very abstract themes where you’re like, Well, how do you interpret that?” she told Vogue. “It’s like singing a song. Either you’re an interpreter or you’re not.”
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In 2018, she embraced the “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” theme in a piece that featured a full nativity scene.
“One can only do your best,” she told E! that year. “This was particularly enjoyable because Dolce & Gabbana — they’re devoted, observant Catholics — and so they’ve grown up with the church and imagery and they had a lot of strong feelings and beautiful sketches so it was easy.”
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In a Met Gala red carpet retrospective video with Vogue, she also opened up about her long-standing relationship wit the late designer Alexander McQueen, who she collaborated on memorable Met moments, one being in 2006, when she and the designer notably arrived in matching tartan (his family’s own) for the “AngloMania: Tradition and Trangession in British Fashion” theme.
After learning the theme, Parker said at the time she “immediately” wanted to go with McQueen.
“What strikes me most about this photograph now, you can see where his shoulder ends and I begin, there’s overlap there … What strikes me about this photograph is where our heads are, how careful I’m being… The shyer he was, the more shy I became. I see that in this,” she says when looking back at their twinning fashion moment.
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“I was in love with him,” she added of the designer, who died in 2010. “I have every pin he dropped from his mouth in my possession still. I have everything he cut off in my possession still. I have things that seem like nothing, from every fitting I did with him in my possession.”
