Hunter Schafer Looks Like She Stepped Right Out of a Gustav Klimt Painting at the 2026 Met Gala

Hunter Schafer is having an art-filled week. In Sunday’s episode of Euphoria, her character, Jules, recreated Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, turning the neo-impressionism masterpiece into a ghoulish scene too explicit for poor Lexie (Maude Apatow) or network television.
But on Monday, on a Met Gala red carpet filled with sheer and barely-there dresses, Schafer was one of the few attendees who opted for a more demure look. She also took the evening’s theme seriously, dressing like a figure straight out of art history.
Schafer arrived to the 2026 Met Gala in a custom Prada look inspired by Gustav Klimt’s 1912/1913 painting Mäda Primavesi. The portrait depicts the nine-year-old girl in a confident stance amid a colorful background, wearing a white dress by Klimt’s friend, couture designer Emilie Flöge, decorated with flowers. Appropriately, the painting is part of the museum’s permanent collection.
Like Primavesi, Schafer wore an empire-waist gown with a line of rosettes just under the bust. While Primavesi’s dress ended just under the knee in layers of ruffles, however, Schafer’s reached the floor. Holes and tears along the waist and skirt made the dress look almost as if it were falling apart. Underneath the linen fabric emerged a floral silk chiffon fabric that continued into a long train behind the actor that draped the steps as she ascended. Schafer finished the look with a bow in her hair just like Primavesi, and a simple face of makeup—pink cheeks and blue eyeshadow—that matched the nine-year-old's own pre-war glam.
The result is Schafer as Primavesi all grown up. Or, like the actor discovered the old Emilie Flöge dress tucked away in an attic, filled with holes after years of gathering dust, and brought it to Prada to refurbish.
The theme on Monday night was Costume Art, and many attendees opened up their old art history textbooks to find references for the evening. Schafer wasn’t the only attendee to dress like a figure who stepped right off a canvas. Artist Amy Sherald tasked Thom Browne to dress her like the young woman from her 2014 painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance). While others, like Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, embodied the infamous John Singer Sargent subject, Madame X. As a result, the evening is truly an art nerd’s dream. Surely, Jules would have enjoyed the festivities greatly.