A look back at Lady Gaga’s 16-minute entrance at the 2019 Met Gala

The self-styled ‘Queen of Camp’ Lady Gaga is known for her controversial, avant-garde fashion looks - who could forget her infamous “meat dress”at the 2010 MTV Awards or her bubble dress at the the House of Blues the year before. She also knows a thing or two about how to make a dramatic entrance and put on a theatrical show. She has never been averse to taking a fashion risk, so why wouldn’t she put on a spectacle at one of the biggest fashion events in the world?

At the 2019 Met Gala, the Born This Way singer did just that, when she put on a 16-minute show to the delight of attendees and viewers, revealing outfit after outfit in honor of the theme: ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’.

Who designed Lady Gaga’s 2019 Met Gala outfits?

Project Runway judge, fashion designer, and Lady Gaga’s fashion director and collaborator, Brandon Maxwell was responsible for Lady Gaga’s neon pink camp-inspired outfit changes, which consisted of four different looks revealed in the span of 16 minutes.

What were Lady Gaga’s four looks at the 2019 Met Gala?

The first look was seen as Lady Gaga arrived on the red carpet, and consisted of a neon pink cape gown with a 25-foot train, accessorized with a matching pink oversized bow, cartoonishly large gold fake eyelashes, and her hair in a short blonde bob with bangs.

Throughout her transformation, she was accompanied by men in suits holding umbrellas as part of her show, holding her train, as she posed dramatically with wide eyes to accentuate her eye makeup.

At four minutes, the singer began descending the stairs to the gala, removing her bow, showcasing the braided details in her hair, as Maxwell helped to unbutton the cape, revealing a black asymmetrically tufted dress with a sweetheart neckline.

She was then given an umbrella, which she enthusiastically posed with. Descending the Met Gala steps once more, Maxwell unzipped her black dress, revealing another neon pink satin gown.

During her performance, she was given a pair of studded cat-eye sunglasses, and a giant retro cell phone, which ended up being a purse, with Gaga reapplying her lipstick as her team mimed touching up her makeup and hair.

For her final look, Maxwell unzipped the pink dress, revealing that under all her dresses, she was wearing a sparkling black bra, panties, six-inch-high platform glitter boots, and black fishnet tights all along. She also dragged along with her a pink wheelbarrow bearing the name ‘Haus of Gaga’, Gaga’s name for her creative team. The wheelbarrow held bottles of rosé and pink cowboy hats.

Lady Gaga’s own thoughts on the transformation

“I know intrinsically that I have a camp soul,” Lady Gaga told Vogue, referencing the essay that inspired the 2019 Met Gala theme, Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’, published in 1964.

“What I really love about what we’re doing is that it, it reads like an essay or a poem and it tells a story,” Gaga said of her outfits. “It’s so in line with Susan Sontag’s notes. I feel that it’s intelligent and I feel it’s also very innocent in a lot of ways.”

She explained in her speech at the 2019 Met Gala: Susan Sontag says in her Notes on Camp that, ‘Camp is a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon; one that rests on the innocence, which is revealed by the person, thing, performance, or otherwise, arrives in extravagance. Extravagance, though, is not the point. Camp is serious business’”.

Lady Gaga has attended the Met Gala on a number of occasions, appearing in 2010, 2015, 2015 and 2019 but we will have to wait and see whether she has something special lined up for this year’s event.