I’m not sure if Chemena Kamali’s contingent of no-make-up-make-up girls felt all that obliged to dress “on-theme” at this year’s Met Gala, given Greta Gerwig, Zoe Saldaña, Emma Mackey, and Sienna Miller ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Art Museum in a series of Chloé gowns plucked from the brand’s most recent collection. There were no references to the Edenic gardens that Count Axel watches over in the JG Ballard novella that inspired this year’s dress code, “The Garden of Time”; nor were there the savage markings of the clock itself that the Met’s fashion exhibition so deftly explores.
But then again: the bohemian girl is perhaps the most legitimate approximation we have to true arcadian glamor—that which just about every other famous person thought to telegraph yesterday evening via florals, bracken, and sand-blasted dresses. Sienna Miller was one of the few guests that best embodied that barefoot attitude, posing before the paparazzi in a ruffled and lace-embroidered milkmaid gown of Kamali’s making. Being the original figurehead for the so-called “boho chic” movement during the aughts, Miller was among a handful of women that Kamali placed on the front lines of her debut catwalk back in March, wagging their legs—and the enormous wooden wedges that anchored them downward—in gleeful unison. Photographs of that moment have done just as much for Chloé’s perceived street cred as the Paddington bag did in 2004. (Read: a lot.)