Kim Kardashian Didn't Want to Cover Her Face for the Met Gala

Kim Kardashian attends The 2021 Met Gala Celebrating In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion at Metropolitan Museum of Art on September 13, 2021 in New York City. — (Image credit: Getty/Theo Wargo)

You've seen Kim Kardashian's Met Gala outfit. You know the one: She wore an all-black Balenciaga get-up that even covered her face (not to mention a $10k ponytail).

But, even though Kardashian loves to make a splash/break the Internet, the face cover was actually not her idea—and she would have been much happier without it, as it turns out.

"I fought against it. I was like, I don’t know how I could wear the mask. Why would I want to cover my face?" she told Vogue in a recent cover interview. "But Demna [Gvasalia, creative director of Balenciaga] and the team were like, This is a costume gala. This is not a Vanity Fair party where everyone looks beautiful. There’s a theme and you have to wear the mask. That is the look."

Demna himself told Vogue that the mask "conceptually speaking, quite important. People would know instantly it was Kim because of her silhouette. They wouldn’t even need to see her face, you know? And I think that’s the whole power of her celebrity, that people wouldn’t need to see her face to know it’s her."

It's clear Demna has a lot of admiration for Kardashian as a fashion figure. "I think for many, many years, there hasn’t been anyone who has redefined the standards of beauty, of feminine beauty, as much as Kim has," he told Vogue earlier in the article. "She did something that is very similar to what Marilyn Monroe did back in the day. She redefined our understanding of what beauty is."

And however you feel about Kardashian, it's hard to deny the impact she has had in fashion.

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Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of British Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and SELF. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.