Natasha Poonawalla | photo credit: Greg Swales
Bleached eyebrows, a baseball cap and Kim Kardashian in Marilyn Monroe’s iconic “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress at the Met Gala 2022 dominated our social media feeds Tuesday morning. Then came a picture of Natasha Poonawalla in a gold Schiaparelli bustier and the Indian media took over.
While earlier editions of the annual fundraising benefit saw actors Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone in glamorous attendance, Poonawalla was the only representative from India this time. The style of Poonawalla, the executive director of the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine maker, has been documented over the years. But unlike her earlier Met outing in 2019, when she paired crystal-embellished dundas with a maang tikka, he dialed in an East-West aesthetic with two globally acclaimed couturiers – Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Schiaparelli. Also, she presented her first saree to the Met Ball.
Natasha Poonawalla arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Photo Credit: AFP
full metal bustier
“Someone like Natasha is fashion-informed and fashion-forward. She thinks of fashion as an art,” begins Anaita Shroff Adajania, former fashion director Vogue India and Poonawalla’s stylist for the event.
Back in January, at Schiaparelli’s Spring 2022 couture show at the Petit Palais in Paris, creative director Daniel Rosebery sent his models down the runway in orbital dresses and planetary bags. Poonawalla was in the audience and the metal bustiers (supposedly cast on the client’s body in-house) caught his attention. The hand-made corset was the starting point of her conversation with Adajania for the Met Gala.
Anaita Shroff Adajania | photo credit: special arrangement
“We thought of several ideas: should it be a saree or a big dress? She wanted to bring it back to India and you know I’m obsessed with sarees. So we basically worked out the options and the color palettes. I knew she had to look like a vision of head-to-toe gold, otherworldly, a dreamy yet contemporary golden goddess,” says Adajania, speaking from New York a day after the event.
In America: An Anthology of Fashion, with the theme of The Gilded Age, the celebrity stylist “wanted to focus on the waist, as a curtsy to the corsetry of the time”.
lean on curtains
Team Natasha, Anaita and Sabya put their spin on the ‘gilded glam’ dress code. photo credit: Greg Swales
Then came Sabyasachi, with whom Adajania has worked extensively. “I want to clarify that what Natasha is wearing is a saree and it has been draped like a saree. This is not a gown. Because all of us, Sabya, Natasha and I, we are very biased towards saris,” says the Mumbai-based mother of two who has styled Kim Kardashian and Gisele Bündchen in saris in the past. she says she chose a Lehenga Sari for “the drama beneath and a flutey, floating quality”. A separate, sheer strap was attached to the bottom of the bustier.
On his official Instagram page, Sabyasachi described the gold tulle saree as “embroidered with silk floss thread and beveled beads, semi-precious stones, crystals, sequins and appliquéd printed velvet”.
Sabyasachi’s Jewelery Game
“As a stylist, I believe in excess. Especially for the Met Gala, which celebrates costume. So we really went all out with the jewelry. Sabya custom made these amazingly exaggerated large earrings, the headband, and we literally filled her arms with precious jewelery and tiny turquoise beads, almost giving it a slightly sophisticated bohemian edge,” says Adajania.
But it’s the gold bustier that caught our fancy. Adajania insists that the sloping sides made it easy to enter. It helps that there are rocker and ring attachments. “It is handmade and an ode to the artistry of sculpture and metalwork of yesteryear,” she adds. “There’s also a little indent, the ‘belly button,’ my favorite part.”
The Met Gala is a fundraising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in NYC. The Costume Institute is hosting a two-part exhibition, and the second part, In America: An Anthology of Fashion, is May 5 through September 5, 2022.
