New York and fashion’s most anticipated evening of the year, the Met Gala, unfolded last night on the first Monday in May. The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, Costume Art, curated by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considers the dressed body across art history, and makes a pointed argument about which bodies art has historically chosen to represent, commissioning 25 new mannequins modeled after different sizes, ages, and abled people to be added to the institute’s permanent collection. In the exhibition, the corpulent, and, the aging body in fashion have all been largely ignored by the art history they reference. The dress code, Fashion Is Art, gave guests the canvas and what they did with it was up to them.

Some guests arrived having clearly done their art history homework. Emma Chamberlain was first to arrive and set the tone early, wearing a custom hand-painted Mugler gown by creative director Miguel Castro Freitas that took 40 hours to paint and four days to dry. Heidi Klum, never one to do anything by halves, came as a marble statue, encased head to toe in a look by special effects artist Mike Marino that referenced Raffaele Monti’s 1847 Veiled Vestal Virgin. Anok Yai drew from European religious iconography, working with Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative director of Balenciaga on referencing Our Lady of Tears, in an off-the-shoulder black gown with a sweeping hood and opera-length gloves, gold body paint, sculpted prosthetic hair, and painted teardrops running down her face. Aariana Rose Philip attended the Met Gala for the first time, arriving in a custom black ruffled gown by Collina Strada, a brand she has modeled for regularly. While, Paloma Elsesser wore the “vestige” gown by Francesco Risso’s new brand, Bureau of Imagination, constructed from nearly 30 vintage dresses sourced on eBay and hand-painted and embellished with metal embroideries in Milan.

Then came the Carters. Beyoncé returned to the Met Gala steps for the first time in a decade, arriving as co-chair alongside Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, and she brought company. Blue Ivy made her Met Gala debut in crisp white Balenciaga bomber jacket over a corseted bubble-hemmed gown, sunglasses, and a tennis necklace. Beyoncé, dressed by longtime collaborator Olivier Rousteing, wore an embellished diamond skeleton over skin-tone mesh, a blue-and-white ombre feathered train requiring five people to carry up the stairs, and a crystal headpiece. The steps became exactly what the exhibition asked for: art, in motion.

Below, we take a closer look at some of our favorite looks from the red carpet.