Last night’s Met Gala was chock-full of celebrities making statements through fashion. The dress code, “Tailored For You” (which took inspiration from the accompanying exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” all about Black dandyism), inspired stars to give us their takes on structured suits and interpretations of menswear in all its forms.
For indie pop icon Lorde, that meant wearing a sleek gray blazer and skirt, as well as a floating rectangle of fabric across her chest. On the red carpet — well, technically the blue carpet — she told Emma Chamberlain the look’s beyond-the-binary inspirations.
“This is custom Thom Browne — this is my creation,” Lorde said. “It’s something of an easter egg. More will be revealed.” Exactly what she meant by that last part, we’ll have to wait and see.
“I just love the open back. To me it really represents where I’m at gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman,” she added, setting the internet ablaze with a fresh round of Lorde discourse.
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“When a peer throws the gauntlet down like that, you’re like ‘OK, yeah, we’ve gotta pick it up,’” Lorde said in a recent interview.
In the wrong hands, Roan’s look could be sexist — but it’s not in the wrong hands. It’s in Roan’s.
It’s only the latest in Lorde’s comments on gender as it relates to her upcoming album, Virgin. Last week, she shared a passage hinting at the album title’s connection to transness, referencing an old definition of “virgin” as “a man-woman or androgynous person.” Before that, she shared in an interview that while working on Virgin, she was “starting to feel [her] gender broadening a little bit.” She even shared in a press release that the album would be exploring her femininity, including its masculine side.
It’s all led up to this Met Gala look, which led one fan to dub Lorde “Kylie Gender.” Regardless of how Lorde identifies, it’s clear that Virgin will speak to anyone who’s gender has ever broken out of a binary box (aka, almost every queer person ever). It’s about to be Lorde Summer, and we’ve never been more ready. Virgin releases on June 27.
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