How to Dress for the Plot

I called my husband from the parking lot.

The sun had that particular 6 p.m. Houston quality the kind that lets you know the day is ending if the traffic wasn’t sign enough. I had just wrapped a special filming project, my makeup was softening at the edges, stomach was growling in hunger but I just had one thing on my mind. And I was already an hour behind for it

“Turn it on,” I said. “Just hit record. I don’t want to miss it.” I told my husband on the phone who was at home with the kids . It was Met Gala Monday

The math was unforgiving. Thirty minutes home if Houston traffic was being kind. Forty-five if it wasn’t. And the carpet was already moving without me.

I assumed I had lost the night entirely by the time I pulled into the driveway. But the TikTok girls and the YouTubers did me a kindness, as they tend to, full coverage, live streamed and dissected, ready to be rewound to the very first arrival. I got to start from the beginning after all while eating the most makeshift of dinners . Kids mac and cheese and bbq meatballs.

Last year, the Met Gala wrecked me in the best way.

I was deep in a season of branding work then, most of what I sold lived in the language of palettes and identity systems and visual cohesion, and that night, Met Gala 2025 inspired an entire mood board. Colors, textures, lines, postures, the architecture of self-presentation. I built brand inspiration around it for weeks.

This year, I sat down to do the same thing and felt nothing.

The clothes were beautiful. Of course they were beautiful. But beauty, on its own, has never been enough to make me write something. I almost forced a think piece anyway, there is always a part of me that wants to keep up, to comment because everyone else is commenting but I’ve been making a quieter decision lately. Not to speak on something until it actually lands. To wait until I have something to say, instead of finding something to say.

I almost didn’t write this at all.

And then I saw what Colman Domingo posted. (We love him right?)

I don’t dress to look nice. I dress to tell a story.

It moved through me the way all the right lines do slowly, then all at once. Because it explained the thing I had been feeling and could not yet name. The theme this year was fashion as art. And what is art, if not story made visible?

I started thinking about it backwards. About every garment I had watched walk that carpet, the most subdued and the most extravagant, the ones the internet adored and the ones the internet picked apart. None of them were merely beautiful. Every one was saying something about the wearer’s politics, their lineage, their grief, their ambition, their refusal, their belief in their own becoming. The over-the-top looks were declarations. The quiet ones were declarations too. There is no neutral garment. There is only the story you meant to tell, and the story you told anyway.

I used to dress like a woman who was not paying attention.

In the years when my children were small, I would throw something on between a feeding and a school pickup, a practice and a homework table, and call it a day. I wasn’t choosing. I wasn’t directing. I was surviving in cotton and tights, and I told myself it didn’t matter because I had bigger things to think about.

But here is the truth I have arrived at lately: that was telling a story too. That outfit , the half-attention, the muted palette, the in-between was an autobiography of a woman in service. It was an entire chapter. I just didn’t know I was writing it.

Lately, I’ve been writing on purpose.

A few nights ago, I wore a pair of pants. And I must say Zara did their big one with these… The weight of the fabric. The silhouette they cut as I crossed the room, the sheerness, the shape . The way they made me move differently than I would have moved without them. They told a story before I had introduced myself. They said something about who I am right now, who I am becoming, what I think about my body, what I think about beauty, what I think about being seen. People responded to me before I had spoken a word.

That is what story does.

I have lead a lot of conversations with women about this lately. Most recently, a five-day training for entrepreneurs, where we kept circling the same idea from different angles. So many of us are building businesses around what we do and what we sell, and in the age of AI, that is the fastest way to disappear. What machines cannot replicate is the narrative, the specific shape of a woman’s attention, her history, her taste, the weight of her meaning. Everything that is unique to the founder is the one thing that cannot be flattened.

The same is true of a wardrobe.

The same is true of a life.

This is what I mean when I say creative directing your life.

It is not about being the most-photographed person in the room. It is not about a uniform, or a brand, or an aesthetic in the small sense of the word. It is about asking, every time you leave the house, every time you cross into the rest of the day: what story am I telling, and is it the one I meant?

The woman you are becoming might still be evolving. Mine definetly is! But you can dress for her now. You can speak for her. You can choose the rooms, the lighting, the pace, the language she would speak. You are allowed to write a fantasy on Tuesday and a romance on Saturday and a comedy by next month. The power is not in picking the right story forever. The power is in remembering that you are the one picking.

That is what the Met Gala, the best of it, anyway ..has always been. Not a parade of expensive things. A reminder that every choice made on the body is a sentence, and every sentence belongs to an author.

It just has to be you

[a few of my favorite looks from the night — the ones that told a story I couldn’t stop thinking about ]