The Making of Grimes’s “ Dune -esque” 2021 Met Gala Look

“I mean, I feel like it started as a Dune thing,” says Grimes (the experimental musician also known as C, and possibly soon, Clair de Lune), of the look that she and stylist Turner created for tonight’s Met Gala red carpet. She’s uptown on Sunday morning , sitting on a bed of silky sheets in New York’s Carlyle Hotel next to a large sword (which she plans to carry on the red carpet), and waiting for a breakfast spread to arrive. Turner glides around the room arranging various chrome accessories. It’s about 30 hours until the red carpet begins for 2021’s gala, celebrating the new exhibit “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” and we’re discussing the logic that led them here.

“I had asked her, ‘What is American fashion? Does that mean that people come as a picket fence? Or a horse, or…?’” Turner says of their first conversations which ultimately brought the pair to Frank Herbert’s American novel, Dune, adapted into both David Lynch’s 1984 film and next month’s iteration starring tonight’s co-host Timothée Chalamet. “We were working with the Dune movie people,” Grimes explains, noting that they’d planned to sort of “hire me as a professional fan, or like, an influencer or something,” she laughs. No official contracts happened in time, so the unofficial look is “Dune-esque.”

Turner reached out to Chris Habana, “a damn legend,” to borrow an original mask from the film that Grimes will wear, and the rest of the details are still up in the air when we’re chatting. “I always say that anything with Grimes is subject to change at the last minute, so we may have a revelation at the 11th hour,” Turner admits. The one guarantee is Iris van Herpen’s custom “Bene Gesserit” gown, which van Herpen describes as “inspired by distant futures,” and spent over 900 hours perfecting. Swooshy, curvy, and extended-lightning-bolt shapes made from mirror-finish liquid silicone were individually hand-cast and arranged in a 3-D “laser-cut labyrinth” onto a nude illusion bodice that melts into 26 meters of gradient-dyed, hand-pleated silk.

“Iris has been one of our favorites. I just feel a kinship to women behind the computer,” says Grimes. “She is a technologist, you know? And I feel like she’s always been on another level. Like, to me she’s kind of got an argument for being the current era McQueen or something, she’s pushing the boundaries in a way that I don’t know if anyone is actually competing with her? We had offers to go with bigger people, but… the first thing she sent through, we were like, this is fucking fire.”

That instinct to gravitate toward artists who choose ideas over mass appeal is one that Grimes and Turner have shared for a long time. The pair started working together almost a decade ago, and have a mind meld now. “When I met her, she was dressing herself. She always calls the shots, and I have grown with her aesthetic—it’s instinctual for me,” says Turner as she fluffs the dress near a window. A former accessories editor for the New York Times and Jane magazine, she was groomed to care about details, and does her best to support other hard-working artists. She and Grimes have “an affection for them, especially young ones who are coming up.” Evidence is all around the room. Custom Lillian Shalom cyber metal elven ears sit in a bed of moss on the nightstand, a Forbidden Knowledge dress (an after party option) is draped over a wardrobe door, metallic Brandon Blackwood and woven mesh Natalia Fedner bags perch on a sill.

For shoes, they’re still deciding what will have enough ankle support. Rombaut’s custom boots aren’t tall enough for the dress, after all, and Turner sourced a pair of lavender lace-up 2017 Marc Jacobs platforms (named “Boucher,” Grimes’s family name) from the personal collection of Pechuga Vintage’s Johnny Valencia, just in case. It’s likely that the strappy heels by Paris Texas (that Turner’s intern painted with silver markers) will win in the end. “I’m just slightly worried about height,” Grimes says. Also, the weight of that sword. “It’s not a prop sword, I tried to pick it up and this is not really a one-handed situation,” she laughs. I reach out and touch the blade, which isn’t necessarily sharp, and certainly less dangerous than the materials from which it was forged. “The sword is based on a western European sword from the end of the Middle Ages around 1400,” Grimes reads aloud from a note on her phone. “…is a permanent piece of the Met’s collection, and the sword is also cast from a Colt AR-15A3,” she looks up. “It’s from these people who are getting people’s [guns] who don’t want to have their automatic rifles anymore, and are melting them down and making them perfect replicas of medieval swords, which I think is just so cool—I think it’s a beautiful thing.”

A knock at the door means breakfast has arrived. “Food? YES! Thank you, sir. Yesss…” Grimes says to greet the Carlyle staffer. She hasn’t eaten in hours, having flown straight from Starbase (SpaceX’s Texas launch site—basically Elon Musk’s version of NASA) and arrived just a few hours earlier. Soon, she’s standing in sweatpants and a pale purple tee, with matching braided pigtails, taking bites of a kale-salad-y looking dish that came along with avocado toast. “Fashion is like food,” she says after politely swallowing a bite. “You need to wear clothes, so I think some people sometimes demean the art side of fashion. And because fashion can be so tied up in ego or sex or whatever else, I feel like there are all these versions of it that are considered sort of like, shallow or something for one reason or the other… I’ll stop going on a rant here, but I was just talking about this to someone the other day.” Turner agrees. “These kids are usually coming out of school wanting to figure out a way to speak to the political climate, and they’re forming theses around what’s going on in the world, and that’s so different than when I started,” she says. “[In the early noughties], it was just like, how to make a woman beautiful—it’s not about that anymore.”

Grimes nods, adding that tonight’s look they dreamed up “does really work with our thesis we’ve been sending people for the album stuff.” It’s too early to share more information on that, though. For now, she turns to Turner: “Wait, do you wanna come to the afterparty?”

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