Every year on the first Monday in May, the Met Gala steps onto the world stage like the final boss of fashion. Ahead of the Met this year, there’s one name that always causes a stir, one of the biggest when it comes to entertainment and fashion—Kim Kardashian. For over a decade, she has treated those steps like a personal runway, a battleground, and sometimes, a confession booth. If the Met Gala is where fashion fantasies go to flirt with madness, then Kim Kardashian is the main character who learned how to turn ridicule into runway, scandal into style, and spectacle into strategy.
Love her, drag her, try to ignore her—she still dominates the conversation. And why wouldn’t she? Over the last decade, Kim Kardashian hasn’t just attended the Met Gala—she’s transformed it into her personal runway of reinvention. Every look, every corset, every controversy—it’s all been part of a bigger story. A story about a woman the fashion world tried to shut out, who turned couture into her comeback.
Let me take you back to 2015. Kim Kardashian walked up those stairs in Roberto Cavalli looking like a feathered femme fatale. 
The dress was sheer, embroidered, dripping in crystals with a snowy feather train trailing behind her like she owned the place. The hair was slicked back. The confidence was loud. After years of backlash for her fashion choices, the internet compared her to Beyoncé again—but this time as an equal. And if you watched her closely, you could see it in her eyes—she knew this was the moment she’d arrived.
2016 was silver, futuristic, almost armor-like. A Balmain masterpiece built with metallic panels that caught every flash of every camera. She wasn’t just a celebrity anymore. She was a fashion icon. The Met theme was “Fashion in the Age of Technology,” and Kim showed up as the ultimate glitch in the system—a woman they tried to delete, showing up as the mainframe. Her wet-look hair, razor-sharp contour, and that impossibly snatched waist? It was a whole mood. Kim Kardashian was using the Met like a mirror, reflecting where she was in her own evolution.
Then came 2017. People didn’t know what to do with that. No corset. No glitz. No waist trauma. Just a white, off-the-shoulder Vivienne Westwood dress and clean skin. The Met theme celebrated Rei Kawakubo’s conceptual genius, and Kim chose restraint. It wasn’t “on theme” in the traditional sense, but it was daring in its simplicity. There’s a certain risk in being minimal at an event built on drama. But Kim was entering her minimalist era. This was the year she was pulling away from the noise, scrubbing her Instagram, retreating from the media chaos. The dress matched the mood. It whispered where her past looks screamed.
By 2018, she was ready to scream again. The theme was “Heavenly Bodies” and Kim showed up looking like a golden relic in Versace. The dress hugged her like divine intervention. Her body glistened, her glam was biblical, and the cross motif on the bodice reminded everyone that if God was a woman, she probably had KKW contour. This look was pure spectacle. Camp before camp. Some dismissed it as predictable, but the execution was undeniable.
2019 confused some but thrilled those who understood fashion. Custom Mugler. His first creation in 20 years. Inspired by a wet, just-emerged-from-the-ocean Sophia Loren fantasy. The dress was latex. The corset was engineered. The droplets, handcrafted crystals. Her waist was cartoonishly cinched, her skin glowed like it was bathed in honey, and the hair? Slick, glossy, defiant. This was fashion as performance art. People questioned her organs, her ribs, her oxygen levels. And I remember wondering how she got in and out of that outfit.
After skipping 2020 due to the pandemic, she came back in 2021 and literally removed herself from the equation. A full-body blackout in Balenciaga. No face. No skin. Just the shadow of herself. And somehow, everyone still knew it was Kim Kardashian. She became an idea. A meme. A concept. She started a fashion trend. Critics called it lazy. The fashion girls called it genius. To me, it was a calculated fashion rebellion. Kim Kardashian, the most photographed woman of our time, said: “You’ll still talk about me, even when I erase myself.” And we did.
In 2022, she showed up as Marilyn Monroe. Not like Marilyn Monroe—as actual Marilyn Monroe. She wore the original “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress. The one museums said shouldn’t leave the archives. The one some said should’ve stayed there. She crash-dieted to fit into it. Controversy erupted. Fashion historians were outraged. And yet, there she stood—blonde, bleached, barely breathing—channeling American royalty. This wasn’t just a look; it was a conversation about legacy, access, and who gets to wear history. It was messy, but momentous. Kim wasn’t dressing for applause. She was dressing to provoke.
In 2023, Karl Lagerfeld was the theme, and Kim Kardashian showed up in 50,000 freshwater pearls, draped like a mermaid escaping the wreckage of Chanel’s sunken cathedral. Schiaparelli did the honors. The dress was corseted, sheer, and barely holding on. Pearls fell as she walked. People joked she was shedding like a snake. But that was the point. Beauty that’s too pristine is boring. Kim’s look was unstable, excessive, borderline absurd—and that’s what made it brilliant. It was Lagerfeld through the Kim Kardashian lens: exaggerated, ironic, unforgettable.
Kim Kardashian in 2024 was a fever dream wrapped in tulle, corsetry, and fantasy. She arrived in a custom John Galliano for Maison Margiela Artisanal look that had everyone squinting at the theme trying to make sense of it. Kim wore a metallic silver corset cinched within an inch of reality, paired with a delicate sheer shrug and a trailing skirt of distressed, ethereal fabric, like it had been plucked from the attic of a haunted château. She leaned into Galliano’s surrealism—part mad Victorian porcelain doll, part reawakened ghost of glamour past. If Sleeping Beauty had a bad habit of breaking the internet, this was her final form. The silhouette was dramatic. The waist, impossibly tiny. The effect? Unhinged in the best way. People couldn’t stop talking. Once again, Kim sparked debates about body image and fashion’s obsession with the impossible.
Now here we are in 2025. The theme: “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” Kim’s story at the Met isn’t just about dresses—it’s about resurrection. She entered the gala as a cultural outsider, mocked, underestimated, dismissed. And look at her now—one of the most talked-about women at fashion’s biggest night, year after year. She’s become part of the Met Gala’s DNA, not because she plays by the rules, but because she rewrites them.
Kim Kardashian didn’t just evolve at the Met Gala—she weaponized it. Each year was a response, a clap back, a pivot. From couch-print maternity gowns to archival Mugler masterpieces, from internet jokes to headline dominance, she turned the Met into her personal runway of redemption. Every corset was a comeback. Every feather, a flex.
What people often miss about Kim Kardashian is that she understands the moment better than anyone. She knows that the Met Gala isn’t just about fashion—it’s about mythology. And she’s spent the last decade crafting hers, one look at a time. Her body has been scrutinized, celebrated, dissected, and redefined. But she’s always one step ahead, daring us to catch up. So when she shows up this year—and you know she will—don’t just look at the dress. Look at the message. Look at the evolution.
