The inarguable breakout star of the 2026 awards season was Chase Infiniti, whose starring role in One Battle After Another swiftly elevated her from Hollywood ingenue to budding A-lister. As I take her phone call on Wednesday afternoon, the actor is in Los Angeles getting her hair done in anticipation of a trip to New York to attend the 2026 Met Gala, her first ever. Needless to say, she’s giddy with excitement.
“I’m quite literally bouncing off the walls because this has been a dream of mine for so long,” she says. “It’s been something I manifest all the time, I’m so excited.”
This year’s exhibition at the Costume Institute, “Costume Art,” examines the ways in which the dressed body has recurred in the arts, at the same time underscoring both how crucial fashion is in depictions of humanity and how it is an artistic discipline in its own right. The exhibition itself contains nearly 400 objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, juxtaposing garments with other objects organized across a series of thematic body types including the classical body, the aging body, or the anatomical body.
A close-up of the dress: an embroidered trompe l’oeil sheath inspired by Venus di Milo. It is fully embroidered using over 1.5 million stacked sequins paired with tiered silk fringes in over 600 different colors layered to mimic brushstrokes.
Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne
Chase Infiniti at the 2026 Met Gala
Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Infiniti was a guest of Thom Browne, the American designer whose outlandish yet cerebral design sensibility made a prolific match for the actor’s style and for the evening’s dress code, Fashion is Art.
Browne, whose guest list also included Olympian Lindsey Vonn, Bill Skarsgaard, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and artist Amy Sherald, dressed each of his guests as embodiments of a section of the exhibition. Infiniti represented the naked body, and her look was inspired by the Venus de Milo, though it was anything but classic. The trompe l’oeil nude illusion dress was a colorful interpretation of the iconic sculpture fully embroidered with paint stroke motifs.
“I love a [red] carpet so much, because I love getting to walk while literally wearing art,” Infitini says of her style. She works with stylists Wayman Bannerman and Micah McDonald, who helped her establish herself as one of the best dressed actors of the 2025-2026 film circuit, with each red carpet helping reveal a new facet of her style. “They quite literally changed my life in terms of the way I present myself and how I express myself with clothing,” Infiniti says of the pair. And while she of course pays great attention to her clothes, it’s her hair that she oftentimes treasures most, or at least considers a crucial component of her self-presentation.
“My hair is something that I take great pride in, and I love showcasing to the world the things that my curls can do,” she says. “It feels authentic to me, and hopefully it’s also something that people can connect to watching from home.”
Infiniti says that Thom Browne has always been one of her dream brands, and recalls mentioning it to Bannerman and McDonald early on in their collaboration. “The fact that I get to wear it to my first Met feels too perfect,” she says. The coming together of her final look was a negotiation with her stylists and Browne between what she’s “comfortable with versus the boundaries I want to continue to push,” Infiniti says. One of her goals was to be bolder and more experimental, something Browne realized with this ensemble. “They are just the perfect brand to do that because of their insane amount of creativity,” she says.
Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne
Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne
“I was excited to go with a dress that is meant to represent the naked body and that mimics a statue that I’ve always found so beautiful,” the actor says. “The color is what really pulled me towards it, because while it mimics a naked body, it is also so bright and colorful, because that is what our bodies are—everyone is different.”
She was also compelled by the boldness of, in a way, baring it all. “I like that it’s really not shying away from the naked body, while still not exposing myself,” she says, “it’s a beautiful piece of art that does a great job at representing the body without showcasing my own—it’s artistic and tasteful.”
Infiniti is currently starring in The Testaments, a dystopian drama series based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name. Just out of a long press tour for her breakout role, she’s again found herself in the midst of promoting a new project. When I ask her about how she’s feeling now, Infiniti does not hold back.
Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne
“I remember right after the Oscars, I had this intense mourning and the weight of everything that I had done until then hit me all at once,” she says. “I remember feeling so tired, so exhausted because it was such a beautiful whirlwind of an experience, and I could not have asked for a better season to be introduced. It was so incredible and I feel so blessed to have been a part of that project, it’s something I will never forget.”
Her feeling of fatigue was something she had to come to terms with, but Infiniti is not complaining. “Every time I feel exhausted I remind myself that I’m exactly where I’ve always dreamed of, and at a level she never thought she would get to achieve,” she says. “I’m just so grateful.”
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