It was while Saoirse Ronan was enjoying the full fairy-godmother treatment courtesy of Danielle Goldberg that Carey Mulligan decided she, too, was ready for a turn under the stylist’s wand. “I know Saoirse, and I was just like, ‘That’s exactly who she is!’” the actor says, while milling around a gym in a friend’s size 13 trainers, having left her own in London. (The sum total of her Met Gala prep, bar “trying to drink water on the plane”). “Danielle has such an incredible eye,” she adds, “and is interested only in working with the person as they are, bringing out their personality, and ultimately making them comfortable.” For Mulligan, that has meant blood-orange-and-tangerine Colleen Allen skirt sets for the Beef premiere, and cocoon-sleeved The Row tailoring for collecting a CBE at the palace. She has always looked good, of course, but now she’s homed in on a singular, quirked-up chic that feels all her own.
Their collaboration will be at its most visible this evening in a Prada column dress of silk radzimir, printed with an abstract, solarised rectangle motif first seen in the house’s spring/summer 1998 collection. “Danielle was poring over the archives, and when she showed me that print, I was just like, that’s so cool and fun,” says Mulligan. “Prada is so good at making clothes that feel slightly ‘off’—and this is that.” Under Miuccia Prada—and now alongside Raf Simons—that instinct for the off-kilter, for de- and recontextualising the familiar—or, as the late Ingrid Sischy once put it, “throwing down the gauntlet to established ways of thinking”—has long invited the sort of chin-stroking discourse befitting a “Fashion is Art” dress code. Still, Mulligan is quick to note, none of this comes at the expense of ease. “I’m not trying to be a sculpture,” she says. “I’m prepared to cinch my waist and wear heels, but I want to feel like myself. The moment it tips beyond that, that’s where I run into trouble.
And so, in a sense, being dressed by a stylist isn’t so different from working with a costume designer: both are, ultimately, in service of truth. (If her Oscar-nominated turn in Promising Young Woman prompted a brief flirtation with hot-pink—a palette she quickly retired, but revisits tonight—her role as Lindsay in Beef proved less influential. “The prairie dresses were spot on for her, but I found myself retreating into black jumpers and black trousers after that.”) Both, too, play an intimate role in defending the private/professional threshold—something that can feel perilously thin when you’re faced with a wall of camera flashes and a scrum of tiny mic-wielding reporters demanding to know what’s “in and out”. “It’s about making the press stuff feel more lighthearted,” she says. “I’ve been on a big journey—from being young and terrified and crying on every red carpet—to thinking, ‘Okay, this is my job, and I’m talking with people I love about projects that have been so much fun.’ I think this look is fun, no, not too serious?”
Even for a former co-host—of 2012’s Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations gala, still her favourite, because it coincided with her honeymoon—the red carpet is just as intimidating as when Mulligan first attended in a lilac Prada mini dress with black tights and peep-toe booties in 2010. “Everytime I’m like, ‘I’ve been to the Met a lot, I’m fine?! And then you reach the queue, and it’s like… s***.” The mood flips, apparently, as soon as the last photographer calls your name. “It all of a sudden becomes a different thing,” she says. “If you’ve been around for as long as I have, you end up bumping into mates you haven’t seen for years, surrounded by the most famous people in the world. It’s madness!” And then there’s the music—she “lost [her] mind” when Cher performed in 2019—and, inevitably, the exhibition. “Even when the theme isn’t Costume Art, the Met Gala is always an extraordinary display of art, both in what’s worn for the evening, and what’s shown in the museum itself.”
Of all the looks past, it just so happens that another of Goldberg’s clients, Zoë Kravitz, takes the top spot in Mulligan’s mental Met Gala hall of fame, for the time she wore a crystal-mesh Saint Laurent dress in 2021. “Never in ten million years would I let Danielle try and put me in that—not even if I was hidden behind a board in a changing room,” Mulligan says, with a laugh. “Zoë is one of the very few people in the universe who could wear that dress and look gorgeous. Her style is incredible.” And yet, for all the polish of those images, consider the hand-wringing that precedes them. “You sit in a car for 40 minutes,” she adds, “and that’s the time when it can all unravel.” On her last Met outing with Prada, in 2019, she found herself attempting to soothe a first-time attendee, Lucy Boynton—only to arrive on the carpet “breaking out in hives”, while Boynton remained entirely unflappable. Oh well: “I’ve asked to travel with Nick Hoult this time,” she says. “Starting the fun before you arrive is a good idea.”
