Sabrina Carpenter Wears Dress Made From Photo Film Stips to Met Gala
Singer Sabrina Carpenter wore a dress made from strips upon strips of photographic film to the Met Gala last night.
The 2026 Met Gala took place on Monday night in New York. The annual event is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and is widely regarded as the fashion industry’s biggest night of the year.
The dress code for this year’s event was “Fashion Is Art,” with celebrity guests and design houses invited to explore their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and to reference depictions of the dressed body throughout art history.
Sabrina Carpenter used her Meta Gala outfit to pay homage to cinema and filmmaking. She arrived at the 2026 Met Gala in a custom Dior dress designed by the brand’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, which was made almost entirely from film strips. The Espresso singer’s gown featured multiple layers of film showing Billy Wilder’s 1954 movie Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden.
The slit tulle dress was constructed largely from film and decorated with rhinestones; it also incorporated still images from the movie. Carpenter’s headpiece had a pendant positioned on her forehead that displayed the title card for the movie Sabrina.
“It’s all made of film, which is my dream,” Carpenter said in an interview about her dress with Vogue red carpet host La La Anthony. “Jonathan Anderson, the genius that he is.”
Carpenter also describes Sabrina as “one of [her] favorite films of all time.”
Online discussion has focused on the materials used in a film-strip dress worn by Carpenter, with some users questioning whether the film strips could genuinely come from the 1954 film Sabrina. One Redditor argued that the “film” appears to have been specially produced for the garment rather than sourced from archival material. They pointed to irregular spacing in the perforations — the small holes along the edge of film stock — and noted that the images visible on the strips look like negatives rather than finished frames. According to the comment, if the material were genuine, it would likely have to be either an original camera negative (OCN) or an internegative created during post-production. Both options, they suggested, would be highly unlikely, as cutting up such elements for a dress would be considered serious archival misuse.
A second Redditor broadly agreed with that assessment but offered a more specific explanation. They suggested the strips are most likely a modern “safety print” made on polyester film, produced to resemble original footage. This type of material is far more stable and less flammable than older acetate film used in the 1950s, making it safer and more practical for a fashion piece.
