The 2025 Met Gala is tonight, and celebs will be sure to look their best – but behind the scenes thousands is spent on drugs, surgery, and extreme weight loss tactics
The Met Gala will take place tonight, having been held on the first Monday of May since 1948. This year’s theme is Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, and will see countless celebs descend on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, available to stream on the Vogue YouTube channel at around 11pm UK time.
The event was formed in order to raise funds for the venue and launch the Costume Institute’s exhibitions, with seats at the exclusive event going for £35,000 per person, or a whole table setting you back up to £300,000. While the Met Gala still raises millions, over the years its charitable efforts have been overtaken by the glitz and glamour, with A-listers vying to get on best dressed lists.
It turns out there’s nothing celebs won’t do to look their best on the red carpet, with their secret routines including drugs couriers, last-minute surgery, and months-long diets and routines. Here are some of the wildest things Met Gala guests turn to for their night at the Met.
Sneaky prescriptions
For most, getting a prescription is a long, difficult business. Firstly, you need to actually require the drug for health reasons, and those in the UK might face a long wait on the NHS while some Americans can’t even afford the medication they need anymore.
Those problems don’t exist for Met Gala guests, with Dr. Amanda Khan telling The Cut that she sets her celeb clients up with a specific drug just to chill them out and make them look their best on the night – despite concerns that it’s been linked to multiple deaths.
“My best-kept Met Gala secret is a small dose of a blood-pressure medication called propranolol, which is a beta blocker that can help with stage fright or performance anxiety. It helps people look calm and collected and reduces sweating and flushing on the carpet,” she said.
The doctor described that in 2024, one of her patients forgot all of her medications just before the event, leaving her team in ‘crisis mode.’ Thankfully, Khan gushed over a “long-standing relationship with a VIP pharmacist” near to the Met, who was able to sort the problem without the usual faff.
“I gave him a call, and within minutes he had everything prepared, including navigating the medications through the guardrails to hand it off to her team,” she said.
Everyone should speak to a doctor before taking new medication.
Crash diets
It’s not uncommon to see many celebs looking much more trim on the night of the Met Gala, but many keep their weight loss regimes a secret. Kim Kardashian is an exception to that rule, openly explaining how she managed to fit into her 2022 Met Gala dress – previously worn by Marilyn Monroe when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
Kim admitted that she ‘cried’ when she first tried the dress on and it wouldn’t fit, leading her to go on a dramatic diet in the days leading up to the Met Gala. Shockingly, the already-slim star lost 16 pounds in just three weeks.
The reality TV star spoke to Vogue on the red carpet during the event, and explained that she’d been on a no-carb and no-sugar diet, while also wearing a sauna suit two times a day and fitting in plenty of treadmill runs.
Her trainer, Don-A-Matrix, spoke to TMZ and responded to claims that the diet was unhealthy. “Not at all. Not from my end from what I saw. We were working out sometimes twice a day. At times, she wouldn’t eat as much, but the second thing is she really put the work in.” He said, adding that it’s “it’s possible to lose 20 pounds in a healthy way”.
Kim also responded to the intense backlash during an interview with Allure, and said: “If I was starving and doing it really unhealthy, I would say that, of course, that’s not a good message. But I had a nutritionist, I had a trainer. I have never drunk more water in my life.”
‘Dying’ for the look
It’s no surprise that Kim’s on this list again, with Kanye West’s ex doing anything to ensure her outfit looks how she wants it. When weight loss isn’t enough, Kim temporarily changes her body shape entirely with extreme corseting, which some experts say could have real damage for the organs if not worn correctly.
Kim underwent breathing training so that she was able to function in the tiny corsets, but still admitted to great pain – and later revealed the bruising the garments had left all over her body.
The Skims founder first turned to extreme corseting in 2019 when she wore a Thierry Mugler gown, and shared on Instagram that she’d taken “corset breathing lessons from none other than Mr. Pearl.” Despite the lessons, she told the Wall Street Journal: “I have never felt pain like that in my life. I’ll have to show you pictures of the aftermath when I took it off – the indentations on my back and my stomach.”
Her waist was even smaller in 2024, when she wore a silver Margiela by John Galliano dress with a corset made out of metal. Sharing her true thoughts on the dress in a later episode of The Kardashians, she said: “I’ve never felt this way before, where I feel like I can’t breathe. I can handle it for so long, but it’s like, I have to pee, I can’t breathe… I literally was dying… I’m literally gonna throw up. I’ve never been more uncomfortable… I’ve never been in this much pain before.”
Surgical tweaks
Rather than get a dress that fits easily, it seems many Met Gala attendees opt to pick a smaller dress and do anything they can to squeeze themselves into it. According to Brazilian Beauty Bar founder Tatiana Vianna, one celeb had just hours to get their dress to fit and quickly turned to a 24-hour drainage fix.
She told The Cut that the celeb arrived for the Met on the Sunday, but swelled up on her long flight to New York. “So, she had a fitting shortly after landing and the dress would not zip – not even a little bit. We did a lymphatic-drainage treatment around midnight and prayed it would be better by morning,” Vianna explained.
“In the morning, she said it was zipping halfway. I had her drink multiple cups of green tea – nature’s diuretic – and went back to give her another lymphatic drainage, and within a few hours, it zipped. It was snug but doable and comfortable enough for the red carpet.”
Meanwhile, others go for far less natural means. Dr. Darren Smith shared that a woman in her 40s got a fat transfer before the Met Gala – a surgical procedure in which fat is removed from one part of the body and injected back into another spot.
The woman brought her husband and assistant, and then made a party out of the body-altering surgery, with the doctor sharing: “She wanted some fat transfer to fine-tune ahead of the Met Gala. They came in after hours, then asked to order food – and they wanted me to put on music. Next thing you know, their friend showed up. It was the strangest impromptu party I have ever witnessed.”
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