At 2:30 AM on Tuesday, May 2, Janelle Monáe climbed onto the bar at Boom Boom Room in New York City’s Standard Hotel to twerk. Wearing a black bikini accented by strands of pearls and rhinestones, and a pair of sky-high Thom Browne platform sneakers, the musician and actress performed alongside her dancers—who were nude, save for artful body paint—to a crowd that included Florence Pugh, Billie Eilish, Jenna Ortega, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, Ashley Park, and many more stars who had graced the Met Gala red carpet just a few hours earlier.
It was, in a way, Monáe’s second performance that night, after having seized the Met Gala steps as a stage upon which to make her first major reveal for the evening. Donning a custom black-and-white Thom Browne coat and an elegant twist of fabric as a headpiece, Monae peeled her jacket off midway up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to expose a sheer pannier dress made of black tulle. The bikini underneath was the same one she wore on the bar at Boom Boom Room—and although she didn’t need to, she lifted up the translucent hoopskirt for eager photographers on the carpet.
“It’s a perfect threesome of me, Thom, and Karl,” Monáe tells me with a laugh on Monday afternoon, while on the way to her hotel to get ready for the evening. “A creative-orgy-threesome—that’s what I would call it.”
All joking aside, the artist knew from the start she wanted her Thom Browne Met Gala look to “feel like an experience—one that takes you through the evolution of me.” To achieve the end of “pulling back the layers of Janelle Monáe,” all the way from her beginnings in the music industry when she donned a uniform of black-and-white tuxedos, the musician went through a few sketch options with Browne and his team. Of course, all parties involved had Lagerfeld on the brain. “Karl and I shared that black-and-white aesthetic, and I knew that with Thom’s structure and whimsy, the look would come…
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