I first met Maximilian Davis in 2015 on a photo shoot for a high street brand, one of those early jobs that felt both inconsequential and defining. He loves to remind me how, in my signature husky voice, I said, maybe too confidently, “We have a lot of friends in common—what’s up.” It wasn’t a question. It was an opening.
What I noticed first about Max was his elegance. It was innate, quiet, not performative. A kind of grace that held space in a room without needing to overpower it. And then, that boundless smile, radiant enough to cut through any sorrow or any dark club—and we did love the night. Our friendship took shape in London, through long conversations, strange parties, moments of stillness between motion. London felt like a portal, full of makers and misfits, possibility and grit.
I had just started modeling full time, and because of my British passport (I was born in a bathtub in Kentish Town, as lore would have it), I could slip easily between London and New York. London always offered a certain kind of freedom. The circles were expansive and surprising. You didn’t need pedigree, just curiosity and the stamina to stay out late.
It was during that time that Max and I became constants. From basements to whispery FaceTimes to lavish Fashion Week parties, and now here at the Met. Our friendship has always been about reverence—his for poetry through design, mine for presence, and a shared language of beauty, discipline, and play.
This is my sixth Met Gala. Each one carries its own weather system, its own myth. Working with my beloved stylist Carlos Nazario, we have learned to shape narrative through dress—through silhouette, through fabric, through tension and restraint. When working with my dear friend Fara Homidi for the beauty look, we leaned into balance. Fresh, bouncy, honest skin and a strange but sophisticated, almost powdery red lip that needed not to match the dress. My hair, done by the angelic Joey George, was a literal twist on the French twist but done in an almost alien-like shape that replicated a seam, a nod to the theme.
But among all of this, this year, the story is Max. This year, I wanted to honor him.
He is, to his closest, affectionately known as Maxine. To the world, he is a poet, a designer, a thinker, but to me, he is elegance among chaos. He is restraint as resistance. He is the embodiment of Black dandyism, not as aesthetic but as inheritance, as strategy, as declaration. Black dandyism is not about assimilation. It is about subversion. It takes the tropes of thinness, whiteness, and wealth, and rejects them. It is precision. It is defiance wrapped in silk.
The character I built in my head was inspired by a character I imagined—a 1920s renaissance woman surrounded by poets and musicians who, after years of luxuriating, puts herself into a cryogenic capsule set to 2040. That tension between glamour and futurism, softness and severity, guided every detail: The sharpness of the feather instead of an expected ostrich; the silhouette, columned instead of romantic; the faux fur rendered in graphic black and adorned with grosgrain to modernize the line. Every detail was a conversation: a refusal to be obvious: A precision Max would recognize.
To wear Ferragamo tonight is to honor a decade of surviving and sculpting, of play but discipline, of building something sacred in the margins. Max has always seen me. Tonight, I hope the world sees him, and knows what elegance can really look like.
Also—I just thought constantly about what André Leon Talley would think of my look. I hope he approves, too.
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