Robert Wun on Dressing Lisa and Beyoncé at the Met Gala

Robert Wun didn’t just have a good Met Gala. He had the Met Gala. The London-based, Hong Kong-born couturier dressed eight guests at fashion’s biggest night — including BLACKPINK’s Lisa, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, tennis star Naomi Osaka, producer Jordan Roth, Indian businesswoman Ananya Birla, singer Audrey Nuna, Norwegian salmon heir Gustav Magnar Witzøe, and Thai luxury consultant Nichapat Suphap. For an independent designer who shows on the Haute Couture calendar in Paris, it was a moment that would be hard to top.

And yet, Wun says he wasn’t panicking. “The management of dressing all of them wasn’t particularly challenging. I was expecting the worst,” he told WWD the day after the Gala. Most clients had reached out months in advance, giving his team enough runway to build each look with care. Still, “it’s still challenging. There’s a lot of back and forth, and even until the day before, we’re still working until 3 a.m. in the New York atelier,” he said.

This was Wun’s fifth Met Gala. But by any measure, 2026 was his biggest.

Lisa’s Look: 66,960 Crystals and a Bride Lifting Her Own Veil

Of all eight looks, Wun singled out what he created for Lisa as “something truly special.” The custom piece — officially titled “The Veil” — is a fully crystallized ivory sheer gown and veil that took its conceptual anchor from a striking idea: a bride lifting up her own veil. Extending from the shoulders are extra-arm sculptures, each one built from 3D scans of Lisa’s actual arms, arranged in postures that reference traditional Thai dance positions. It’s surrealist couture that also happens to be deeply personal.

The execution was staggering. The gown is embroidered with exactly 66,960 white Swarovski crystals, each placed by hand, across 2,860 hours of work. The arm motif draws from Wun’s Fall/Winter 2025 Couture Collection, but his team rebuilt the concept entirely around Lisa’s form. She finished the look with a Bulgari sapphire-and-diamond necklace — the one flash of color against all that ivory.

Wun says he deliberately proposed something Lisa had never tried before. “When I propose a design for a moment worth fighting for, especially on the carpet, such as the Met Gala, I would try to propose something that maybe the artist has never tried before, or not usually a direction they would be willing to explore,” he said. “I was very pleasantly surprised when they actually confirmed to go ahead with that look.”

The two had never met in person before the week of the Gala — despite Lisa wearing his designs for the past five years. When they finally did, Wun was floored. “She has been nothing but sweet, kind and willing,” he said. “Although the veil and armpiece are so heavy. I think it’s about five kilograms in weight. At the end, when she had to be on the carpet by herself — she literally just owned it like a champion. You don’t feel like she is carrying all that weight on her shoulders. She simply shone, and I have so much respect for her.”

Lisa, a member of the Met Gala host committee this year for the first time, attended the 2025 Gala in a Louis Vuitton look. This year, she was the only BLACKPINK member to wear something outside of a brand endorsement — and she made it count.

Beyoncé’s Stargaze Gown: 20 Rounds of Sketches, 4,340 Hours of Work

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter wore Wun’s Stargaze Gown inside the museum — not on the red carpet, where she arrived in a custom Olivier Rousteing design alongside her daughter Blue Ivy Carter. The conversation for the Wun piece started back in December, and what followed was an unusually collaborative process.

“There are over 20 rounds, I believe, of design sketches, and a lot of conversation back and forth. A lot of personal notes on what she loves,” Wun said. The concept he landed on was cosmic in scale: the perspective of stars looking down at Earth, seeing the golden glow of coastlines at night — the kind of view you catch from a plane window. When Wun described the idea to Beyoncé, she already had a reference. “She said she found that look also on social media, she screencapped it, shared it with us, and she said ‘Yeah I think this is the one.’”

The finished gown contains 3,180,000 stitches of embroidery across 4,340 hours of handwork — the highest volume of work Wun’s label has ever put into a single piece. “Even when we got to New York, the amount of work that we carried out just to make sure all the embroideries were perfect, and the veil sat right,” he said. “I have to give all the credit and all my love to my incredible team. They have worked so hard on this look, and to be able to see that come together inside the museum as well has been truly phenomenal.”

Beyoncé, one of the four co-chairs of the 2026 Gala alongside Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, made her Met debut back in 2008 in Armani Privé and attended consistently through 2016, often in custom Givenchy. This year marked her return to the event after a decade-long absence. “It is an honor to dress the co-chair of this year’s Met Gala and to be part of her big return,” Wun said.

Naomi Osaka’s Two-Act Moment

If Lisa and Beyoncé were the headliners, Naomi Osaka gave the Gala one of its most theatrical surprises. She arrived in a sculptural ivory coat with open seams that exposed red crystals from within, adorned with stripped feathers flaring upward like a fountain — and a matching wide-brimmed hat by London milliner Awon Golding. Underneath, when she shed the outer layer, was a breathtaking red gown illustrating the human anatomy, needle by needle, in four shades of faceted Swarovski crystals. The red gown alone totaled over 3,280 hours of handwork.

The outer look had already made its debut in the Met’s current “Costume Art” exhibition — so Osaka was, in a sense, wearing art that was already on display inside the museum she was walking into.

“This is the shedding of the skin and the human anatomy,” Osaka told Variety on the carpet.

It was only her second time attending the Met Gala — she co-chaired the 2021 edition — and her first appearance at the event in five years. The collaboration with Wun began earlier this year at the Australian Open, where she walked onto the court in a jellyfish-inspired dress and a massive veiled hat from the designer. That look drew criticism from some corners of the tennis world, but Osaka was unfazed. “There’s a demographic that’s been talking about ‘traditional’ tennis outfits and calling me classless for what I wear,” she wrote on Threads. “To be honest, I see it for what it is. I don’t do this for them though; they will never get it, and I don’t want them to. I do this for the people who are like me.”

Wun and Osaka had never met in person until the London studio fittings for the Gala looks. “I was so appreciative to meet him and see how he works,” she said. “He didn’t have an ego and was just willing to change things to make me more comfortable or hear my perspective on things.” For his part, Wun — a self-described huge tennis fan — was just as taken with her. “Being able to share this creative moment has been incredibly special,” he said.

Osaka was attending ahead of traveling to Rome for the Rome Open, which began the following day — a reminder that for her, fashion and competition aren’t separate worlds. She’s been treating them as one for a while now. The Met Gala just happened to be the biggest stage yet.