The Kardashian family well and truly brought their game at this year’s Met Gala - none more so than Vogue cover star Kim Kardashian.
Dressed in an impossibly waist cinching dress dripping with raindrop-like crystals, her bespoke look by Thierry Mugler was one of the standouts of the night. Unsurprisingly, it did draw some controversy online with people honing in on her impossibly small waist with some even speculating that Kim had ribs removed for the outfit.
Kim addressed this wild theory in a Wall Street Journal interview, where she also discussed the agonising ends she went to in order to nail the look. When asked about whether or not she had ribs removed, she said, “I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
Instead, it was revealed in a behind the scenes video that Mugler had teamed up with the “best corset maker in the world” Mr. Pearl for Kim’s staggeringly snatched outfit.
Kim previously revealed she took "corset breathing lessons" from the couturier and she said, “I have never felt pain like that in my life.”
“I’ll have to show you pictures of the aftermath when I took it off,” she continued, “The indentations on my back and my stomach.”
In the same behind-the-scenes Vogue video, Kim addressed editor Anna Wintour, “Anna, if I don’t sit down for dinner, now you know why. I can only like half-sit.”
Kim’s dress was a deeply significant one to the fashion industry at large, as it marked the first time in over twenty years that Manfred Thierry Mugler - the designer behind Thierry Mugler - had created a new outfit. While it bore strong resemblances to Kim Kardashian’s Vogue cover, the original inspiration for it was a 1957 film called Boy on a Dolphin, in which Sophia Loren emerges from the water in a clinging shirt dress.
The dress itself was made of silicone and silk organza, combined with crystals that continued onto her heels and down to her wrists. In fact, her nail artist Tom Bachik came through and even applied small dangling crystals to her fingernails to match.
In a post on Instagram, Kim revealed that the dress had taken 7 months to make and included fittings in Montreal, Paris and LA - igniting a "magical inspiring connection" between herself and the atelier. She explained that the moment she and Kanye knew that the Met Gala theme was camp for 2019, they decided that they had to go to Mugler who Kim called "the king of camp".
An assistant for Mugler revealed the designer had decided to come out of retirement because he “understood immediately that [Kim] was the next one, the next Venus of beauty”.
