If there was any question as to who won the Met Gala red carpet on Monday (or whether such a designation was needed), it was answered 15 times on Rihanna’s instagram account this morning. There was a winner and that winner was Rihanna.
The first sign that Rihanna would win appeared Monday afternoon, when she posted a slow-motion video of herself entering the 2015 Met Gala in a yellow Guo Pei dress with a voiceover of Andre Leon Talley calling her the queen of the night. “UGH I love a girl from humble beginnings who becomes a big star. It’s like the American dream! That’s how you do it…just keep GOING, I want MORE train and MORE train!”
This was foreshadowing. I like to imagine Rihanna seeing this video, nodding in agreement, tapping “share” on her IG and then throwing her phone off a boat and picking out a fresh one from a napsack of iPhones to her left.
Then came the following, captioned simply “sqwod.”
This photo of her looking like royalty surrounded by plebeian men in suits was an all-but-literal hint of what was to come. By the time she arrived that evening at the Met Gala resembling a sentient flower arrangement slash paper mache sea anenome/rainbow fish, the redemptive tail to a parade of safe red carpet l😴😴ks, we shouldn’t have been surprised remotely.
A cursory glance at Twitter could have confirmed what all of us already knew: Rihanna and Rihanna’s look alone were worthy of Rei’s red carpet. But the next day, just in case we missed the telltale signs — like a friend who provides you with notes from yesterday’s class — Rihanna posted the following collage of various outlets declaring that she won and/or shut down the red carpet and was the undisputed queen of the Met, with the caption “Casual.”
Two hours later, she shared a screenshot of a Vogue feature on her shutting shit down with the caption, “when u comme to play,” a pun which only further substantiated the point. Soon followed four separate illustrations of her in her Comme dress, proof that in less than 24 hours she’d served as a muse for artists all over the world. No captions were necessary and thus none were provided.
As a simultaneously gratuitous and necessary followup, Rihanna then posted a screenshot confirming her afterparty, too, was better than everyone else’s. “When u win the party too,” she wrote.
If there were any lingering doubts as to the perfection of Rihanna, Rihanna’s Instagram and Rihanna’s Met look, they were surely put to bed in the last 24 hours with the help of Rihanna, Rihanna’s Instagram and Rihanna’s Met look, which I’m sure now, more than ever, we do not deserve.
Photos by Jackson Lee/FilmMagic and Pool/Anwar Hussein Collection via Getty Images; collage by Maria Jia Ling Pitt.
