The spectacle of the Met Gala is not contained to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Simone Ashley would be the first to tell you. It includes airport arrivals, pre-event pap walks along the Upper East side, hotel departures, after-parties, and all the morning after looks that are perhaps just as curated as those designed for the gala itself. See: Kendall Jenner leaving a New York hotel yesterday afternoon in a pair of embroidered slippers as if to remind spectators that she had up until this point been hard at work.
Simone Ashley’s final coup of the 2024 Met Gala season reaffirmed her status as a cool girl on the rise, as she dressed in a leather jacket—something of a staple for this Surrey native—jean shorts and knee-high cowboy boots. It’s a look that was first popularised in the summer of 2023, when Bermuda-length jorts got a second wind thanks to Troye Sivan-types, who’d often wear them with tanks and trucker caps as a subversion of the clothes closer associated with Rust Belt machismo. (See the photos here.)
Much like Jenner’s $1,000 slippers, I’d imagine this look functioned as a sort of factory reset for this actor—wired headphones in, world out—who posed before a phalanx of photographers in a Cher-inspired, custom Prabal Gurung gown earlier this week. “I’m keeping my head down as much as I can,” Ashley told Vogue India back in April. “Life after Bridgerton has been so exciting. I was doing all these unbelievable things, like going to the Met Gala and shooting fashion editorials. It was a whirlwind.”
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
