Moschino under designer Jeremy Scott is a label that knows how to have serious fun at the Met Gala, as proven by the light-up chandelier worn by Katy Perry to the camp-themed party in 2019. But the custom canary-gold look worn by Madelaine Petsch at the 2022 Met Gala Monday night married the big personality one expects from Moschino (those gloriously puffed sleeves) with the contained poise befitting the evening’s “Gilded Glamour” dress code. As a result, the Riverdale actor seemed every bit a next-gen John Singer Sargent muse, as if she had floated right out of one of the museum’s high-society portraits.
“With her really fair skin and that beautiful, coppery red hair, I don’t think there’s a better person who fits that time period in this modern age,” says hairstylist Marc Mena, responsible for Petsch’s fairytale updo. “I said to her, ‘I want you to look like a painting.’ That was my inspiration.”
The conversations all centered around the Moschino dress, with a flared mermaid train, those cream-puff sleeves, and matching opera gloves, all using fabric seen on the house’s fall 2022 runway. “Funnily enough, Jeremy had shirts in the collection that read ‘Gilt Without Guilt,’ which is a huge nod to this year’s Met theme, and he had no idea at the time he created them,” Petsch explains. “So this confirms what I’ve been thinking for a while now: Jeremy Scott is a visionary and psychic.” Seeing as the exhibition celebrates the often overlooked talents of dressmakers and tailors, she singles out the meticulous beadwork and hand-done pleats: “I’m so grateful to everyone that spent countless hours putting all of their effort into creating this dress, and this [moment] is as much theirs as it is mine.”
“There’s a lot of opulence, for sure,” Mena says, calling attention to the swaths of fabric and layered detail work. As a counterpoint, “I almost wanted the hair to look like it was lived in.” The natural resources at his disposal were considerable. “It is honestly the best mane of hair that I’ve worked with in my life,” says the stylist, who gave Petsch a take-home assignment the night before the Met: to wash her hair in the morning, rake in LolaVie’s Perfecting leave-in conditioner, and let it air-dry in a braid. “By the time I got here, she had this unbelievable texture.”