Kim Kardashian is the queen of bodycon and her Met Gala looks are proof

When A-list stars attend the Met Gala, they will often use fashion to transform into characters for the night – donning bold, theatrical ensembles that are deliberately more extravagant than their everyday style. For Kim Kardashian, however, the red carpet has always been an extension of her signature body-conscious aesthetic. Over the years, her appearances on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have served as a Leigh Bowery-esque excercise in physical enhancement.

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Kardashian’s Met Gala journey began in 2013, attending the Punk: Chaos to Couture ball while pregnant with her first child. Her now-iconic floral Givenchy gown – a high-neck, long-sleeved design complete with matching gloves – quickly went viral. “There were all these memes about me and this couch,” she told Vogue in 2019. “I cried all the way home.” At the time, the reaction stung, but in hindsight, delivered a powerful lesson: you’ve got to own it. The look remains one of the most talked-about Met Gala moments to this day.

Since then, Kardashian has continued to embrace fashion that emphasises form and figure. For the 2019 Camp: Notes on Fashion theme, she wore a custom Thierry Mugler creation made of dripping crystals and wet-look silk organza, designed to evoke Sophia Loren emerging from the sea in Boy on a Dolphin. Beneath it all, she wore a waist-cinching Mr Pearl corset so tight she was unable to sit. “I used to dream about this night,” she said at the time. “I used to sit at home on my computer looking at all the pictures of everyone, dreaming about attending a Met Ball without even believing it would happen.”

In 2021, Kardashian went viral yet again – this time in a head-to-toe black Balenciaga ensemble that covered her entire body, including her face, rendering her unrecognisable beyond her own infamous silhouette. It was a stark departure from her usual skin-baring designs. “What’s more American than a head-to-toe black look?” she said. The look was about anonymity, about being a type of cultural icon without the need to show skin or face. “At first,” she added. “I didn’t get it. ‘I can’t go to the Met and cover my face; what is my glam team going to do?’ But I trust Demna 100 percent. You have to have that trust so that even when you’re taking a big risk, you know it’ll be worth it.”

President John F Kennedy in 1962. “Nowadays everyone wears sheer dresses, but back then that was not the case,” said Kardashian. “In a sense, it’s the original naked dress. That’s why it was so shocking.” Wearing the historic dress required intense preparation, including a controversial crash diet. “I always thought she was extremely curvy. I imagined I might be smaller in some places where she was bigger and bigger in places where she was smaller. So when it didn’t fit me I wanted to cry because it can’t be altered at all.”

And then there was the 2024 Met Gala, when Kardashian appeared in an organ-bruising Maison Margiela corset that had spectators questioning whether or not she could even breathe. The waist-cinching design had been a memorable feature in John Galliano’s spring/summer 2024 couture presentation, with behind-the-scenes photographs displaying the painful welts left behind on his models’ torsos. It was an extreme measure to undergo – precipitating months of waist-training and breathing classes – for nothing more than a red-carpet photograph.

As the next Met Gala approaches, expectations for Kardashian’s look are sky-high. Revisit her best moments, here.