On Monday, Madonna made her return to the Met Gala after a seven-year hiatus. For this year’s theme of “tailored for you,” Madonna wore a Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann: a cream double-breasted tuxedo in peached silk, complete with a crisp white piqué plastron shirt paired with a white piqué bow tie. The look was finished off with jewels by Diamonds Direct.

It almost wasn’t even a reality, says Madonna’s stylist Rita Melssen. 

“She actually wasn’t going to go, it wasn’t even really on her radar. And then someone brought it up to her, and of course she was like, ‘this is an incredible theme and I want to support and I want to show up,” Melssen says. “We did some really deep, deep dives, deep research, got really into Black dandy over the decades. What did that look like from the 1800s into the 2000s and all the different iterations and versions of it. Her and I really just sat down. We shared feedback, we shared images. It was a really collaborative process between the both of us.”

Melssen felt there were any number of directions they could go in when it came to a designer to work with, until someone sent her an image of Madonna’s iconic 1995 VMA look wearing a Tom Ford for Gucci blue silk button-down shirt.

“I was like, ‘wait, Haider just had this incredible, incredible season and the first collection [at Tom Ford], and I had actually met him when he came to her tour in Paris.” 

She gave him a call and the response was an immediate “yes.” 

“He has such a deep reverence for M and everything she stood for. Haider also is adopted, and she has four adopted children. And so there was a really deep connection there. Haider also grew up in Africa, and M obviously does so much work in Africa and Malawi and with her charities, so there was already sort of this overlap and connection there,” Melssen says. “When I called him he was like, ‘I want to make her just so powerful and elegant and show just the essence of who she is.’”

The whole look came together in just about three weeks. The look drew inspiration from Gladys Bentley, a Black lesbian blues singer in New York City in the 1920s. 

“Gladys Bentley was one of the original Black female dandies. She was a performer in Harlem around the Harlem Renaissance, and she used to wear these incredible white suits, like a white tail coat, white shirt, white hat, white pants,” Melssen says. “And she was a Black lesbian during that time, which was unheard of. And so she really pushed a lot of boundaries and she made people see gender and identity in a very different way and was really a trailblazer in that way.”

Madonna was immediately interested in Bentley as a reference when Melssen suggested the idea.  

“Of course it’s very different, don’t get me wrong. But there’s just so many ways in which when M was coming up, she also challenged gender identity and what a woman can and can’t do, also in reverence to all the women that came before her,” Melssen says. “In her own way, M is a dandy, to have this audacity to push boundaries and to push people to think of her and women in general in a very different way.”

The first time Madonna tried the look on for Melssen and Ackermann and the Tom Ford team, the whole room knew it was the one. 

“Haider was standing next to me and the literal hairs on his arms raised and he had goosebumps,” Melssen says. “So we all slept well that night.”