Jeremy Pope Wore Archival Vivienne Westwood to the Met Gala

Vivienne Westwood’s fall 1996 collection marked the late British designer’s official foray into menswear, with two sensationally beaded and corseted evening jackets as its ultimate hero pieces. On Westwood’s catwalk, these dual pieces were styled with piratey headscarves and black wool trousers. One of them, named “Martyr to Love,” will be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s spring exhibit, “Costume Art,” which opens to the public this Sunday, May 10. Its twin, “Slave to Love,” walked the Met Gala mossy faux cobblestone carpet tonight on Jeremy Pope.

This year’s dress code, “Fashion Is Art,” drew numerous interpretations ahead of the actual gala—most of which connected with the corporeal realm, or the many ways the body itself serves as the ultimate costume. Apropos of the theme, Pope’s Westwood evening jacket boasts a trompe l’oeil torso: On its front, myriad pearls conspire to create a beefy, musclebound body—pecs high and tight, abdomen blocky and bulging, waist as snatched as can be. Its back side, covered in large, bloody lacerations accentuated by dangling ruby-red droplets, tells a different story.

Sophie Chan Andreassend / Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood

“The back of the garment has a very heavy kind of reference,” says Pope over the phone. “The duality felt very aligned with how I understand myself as an artist and as a Black man trying to navigate and hold space for legacy, visibility, and truth specifically in these types of spaces.” This year’s Met Gala marks Pope’s seventh time attending. (The actor, in collaboration with stylist Law Roach, pulled an archival, bicep-forward look from Maison Margiela’s fall 1997 collection for last year’s fundraiser, too, which celebrated Black dandyism.)

But this particular Westwood look had been on Pope’s mind for years. “I used it as a reference image for a lot of the conversations I have with creatives just on different projects,” he shares. When the theme of this year’s gala was announced last November, the Westwood jacket came to mind as a talking point, a garment that could be useful to communicate with potential designers the mood he wanted to strike. “But then [Law] was kind of like, ‘What if we go directly to Vivienne?’”

Courtesy of Jeremy Pope