Rita Ora says beads on her Met Gala look are ‘older than anyone on this planet’

The MET Gala 2024 – New York

Rita Ora said the inspiration behind her colourful Met Gala outfit spans “two millennia”.

The singer and beauty brand founder – she launched her haircare line, Typebea, last week – wore a unique beaded dress by Marni to fashion’s biggest night.

She wore a sheer bodysuit, and over the top were layers of colourful beads trailing to the floor – leaving the sides of her body completely exposed.

Ora, 33, had short, wet-look hair, shimmering eyeshadow, and posed for pictures alongside her husband, filmmaker Taika Waititi, who wore an all-brown leather suit.

The Met Gala celebrates the opening of the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year, the exhibition is called Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, and the official dress code is the Garden of Time.

The exhibition looks at 250 extremely fragile and rare pieces from the Costume Institute’s collection, putting the spotlight on fashion history.

While many celebrities channelled the natural, floral theme for their outfits, Ora instead chose to focus her outfit around the historical side of things – and she later took to Instagram to explain the craftsmanship and inspiration behind her unique look.

“This dress encapsulates, in the most delicate and powerful manner, a real tapestry of human crafts spanning a period of two millennia from Egypt to Rome,” she wrote.

“It is composed of one of a kind antique glass beads from all over the world, highlighting one of humankind’s most ancient crafted objects and paired together with antique handmade glass beads from Murano, ranging between the Forties all through to the Seventies.”

According to Ora, the construction of the vertical beads was “to make an intricate pattern play between colour and texture”, while adding: “The verticality of the dress elongates the silhouette, and the slight tension around the waist exhale the curves of the body further. It is all hanging from a beautiful handmade metal structure that adorns the neckline almost as a jewel and defines it in a very graphic way.”

In the Vogue livestream, Ora told hosts Ashley Graham and Gwendoline Christie the beads on her dress were “very old”, saying: “All of these beads age back to the first and second century BC, I mean some are older than anyone on this planet.”

She explained that the team “searched really far to find such individual beads”, spanning across North Africa and Europe – and unsurprisingly, that the dress was “very heavy”.

Ora was celebrating her tenth appearance at the Met Gala.

Previous outfits include a gold Marc Jacobs gown worn to the 2019 Met Gala – which was themed around camp fashion – worn with 280 carats worth of Lorraine Schwartz diamonds, and a nearly-naked black Prabal Gurung dress with a dramatic train to last year’s event.

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