“Where is my tiara? Lila Moss asked Conner Ives, during one of a handful of Met Gala fittings that made her feel like a princess. The dress: an exquisite champagne-colored adaptation of the hip drape gown from Ives’s fall 2026 collection (look 28, to be precise), but with a nod to Gustav Klimt’s 1907 oil painting Water Serpents, which mused on the sensuality of women’s bodies, per the “Fashion Is Art” dress code.
Crafted from three 1920s dresses sourced by Ives in Paris, the entirely sequined gown is made up of gelatin (“because they didn’t have plastic sequins until the ’30s!” quips Lila, evidently embracing the history lesson of it all), with a hand-dyed silk chiffon base that required seven dye trials in order to perfect the right shade of taupe. “He basically built the dress on me,” says Moss of the collaboration, which unfolded during fittings on either side of the Atlantic. In New York, they have basically been roommates at The Mark, with Lila showing off her vintage shopping hauls and Conner hand-beading the final flourishes for both her red-carpet gown and an LBD for the after-party, inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X. “How does your brain work like this?” Moss asked, in awe, each time she stopped by.
For Ives’s part, he wanted Lila to feel like “the best version of herself.” The model says the gown’s winged back makes her feel otherworldly—“it’s almost a bit mermaid”—as well as princess-adjacent. The beauty, then, had to feel like Moss—whose Met Gala prep includes lymphatic drainage, electrolytes, and walking outside in the sun—through and through. Bronzed and shimmering, like the dress itself, Ives did find a way to “Conner-fy” Moss’s edgy updo with the help of a clutch of decorative brooches stolen from another vintage dress. Every detail has been thought through.