After a series of head-turning red carpet looks during this year’s awards season, Anna Sawai is ready to bring her style to her first Met Gala.
The “Shogun” actress, who won Emmy, Golden Globe and SAG awards for best actress in a drama television series, grabbed the attention of the fashion world in a series of gowns that tastefully exposed skin and pooled elegantly around her feet.
So, even though she was not quite expecting to get an invite to fashion’s biggest event so quickly, it did seem like a fitting final stop on her whirlwind red carpet tour.
“The Met is the place where you can have the most fun,” Ms. Sawai, 32, said on a video call from a hotel room on the Upper East Side on Sunday, “because it’s a heightened version of the red carpets that we get to do.”
For the event, Ms. Sawai opted for a white blazer and trousers from Dior. She’ll top the look with a wide-brimmed hat by Stephen Jones — tilted ever so slightly to cover her right eye for a “mysterious look,” she said. In the ensemble, she said she felt like she was tapping into a new side of herself: “I feel like every carpet, I’ve only worn dresses.”
“This is going to be the first time that I’m getting to kind of channel my androgynous side,” she added. “And I’m really excited to pay respect to Black dandyism.”
This year’s dress code, “tailored for you,” was intended to inspire creative interpretations of classic tailoring techniques. The 5-foot-1 actress said her clothes always needed to be tailored: “I’m a tiny person. For me, clothes being tailored is what changes everything, any look, because most clothes are always a little too long or big for me.”
Ms. Sawai worked with the stylist Karla Welch on the suit designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, which she paired with a Cartier watch. In the past year, both Cartier and Dior announced that Ms. Sawai would be an ambassador for the brands.
“It’s a very sharp suit, the hem is on a razor’s edge,” Ms. Welch said in a phone interview. “It’s just about respecting the theme and creating a beautiful look.”
To Ms. Sawai, who described her look for the gala as “very simple and very sophisticated,” dandyism is about more than clothes. “It’s not just about how you look,” she said, “but presenting yourself as the person that you know you ought to be. I usually tend to go for things that are a little bit more simple.”
The actress, born in Wellington, New Zealand, and raised in Yokohama, Japan, said her suit made her feel “so good” and “so comfortable.” That’s a contrast to red carpet dresses where “comfort isn’t really the first thing that you think of,” she said.
In the suit, “I don’t have to think about not spreading my legs or anything like that,” Ms. Sawai said. “I can just sit the way I want to sit. I can walk the way I want to walk.”
