Princess Beatrice's 2018 Met Gala Look: Purple Silk, Jewelled Headbands and No Tiara
Princess Beatrice wore a custom deep royal purple silk chiffon gown by Alberta Ferretti, an Italian designer, to the 2018 Met Gala in New York. She did not wear a tiara. A Hello! magazine feature published on 12 November 2026 looks back at the outfit and its surprising choice of headwear.
The Met Gala is the annual fundraising evening for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York museum's fashion department. Each year it is built around a theme. The 2018 theme was "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination." Beatrice was 29 and living and working in New York at the time. The gala also took place less than two weeks before the wedding of her cousin Prince Harry to Meghan Markle.
The gown had sheer, billowy sleeves and a high ruffled neckline. Diagonal beaded jewel embellishments ran across the bodice and shoulders, catching the light across the front of the dress.
The headwear was the talking point. Beatrice wore layered, jewel-encrusted rope headbands in burgundy, pink, blue, yellow and black, rather than the traditional royal tiara, a jewelled headpiece usually reserved for formal royal dress. Hello! describes the look as a departure from what many people expect from a royal guest at a major event.
Her shoes were gold metallic mirror sandals. She carried a black snakeskin Kotur box clutch, a small, structured handbag shaped like a box.
The evening has its own royal footnote. Hello! notes that Princess Diana was the first member of the British royal family to attend the Met Gala, in 1995. Anna Wintour, the long-serving editor of Vogue magazine and a central figure in the event, was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. A damehood is a senior honour in the British honours system, awarded by the monarch.
Hello! also frames the 2018 look as one of the more memorable outfits from that year's gala. The gala itself is a fixed date on the New York fashion calendar, and guests are invited to interpret its theme, which is how a royal guest in a purple gown and multicoloured headbands came to stand out.
