Sarah Pidgeon arrived at the 2026 Met Gala in a Loewe look built around a twisted bandeau top and a column skirt, both rendered in chartreuse matte satin. Designed by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the outfit fit the night’s dress code, “Fashion Is Art,” with the kind of sharp, sculptural line that made it impossible to miss on the steps.
The look had been taking shape for months. Pidgeon said she first fixated on Loewe fall 2026 look 43 when she attended the brand’s show in Paris in March and texted her stylist, “Oh, I really like this one,” after seeing it. She later said the piece felt “very whimsical, but very powerful at the same time, and very architectural,” and that same look became the starting point when she met with McCollough and Hernandez about Met Gala ideas.
The result was more than a red-carpet dress. Pidgeon, who became something of a household name this year thanks to Love Story, said the final fitting process had to work around her schedule while she was shooting in Australia. The Loewe team sent a tailor from Paris to her Queensland outpost for a toile fitting, where she tried on a muslin prototype of the dress. “I’ve been shooting in Australia, which certainly makes fittings a bit more difficult—at least long distance—but it was so magical,” she said.
That distance gave the moment a different kind of theater. Pidgeon said of the finished look, “I feel not only statuesque, but like I am the canvas for this piece of art that will walk up the Met steps.” Loewe’s approach also fit neatly with the brand’s broader eye for sculpture and the Costume Art exhibition, a direction McCollough and Hernandez have echoed in other runway references, including Ellsworth Kelly and Cosima von Bonin.
Pidgeon was no stranger to the event. In 2024, while starring in Stereophonic on Broadway, she attended the Met Gala in a Christopher John Rogers dress, after squeezing in about 45 minutes to get out of her hair, makeup and costume following a cast performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Two years later, the pace was different, but the aim was the same: to make the clothing do the talking. On this night, Loewe answered the brief with a look that was both wearable and unmistakably built to be seen.