Amanda Seyfried is anxious about the environment.
“I feel a lot of guilt and shame, literally every day,” said Ms. Seyfried, who was calling from a film set in Yonkers, N.Y., on the Friday before the Met Gala.
“If I’m going to go to the Met ball,” she said, “there has to be solar panels on my head, or I’m not going.”
This was a joke, but Ms. Seyfried takes sustainability seriously. Around the time she starred in “The Dropout” — she portrayed the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, for which she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe — she co-founded a company that makes children’s playhouses from eco-friendly materials.
On Monday night, many attendees executed the Met Gala theme, “Garden of Time,” by leaning into florals. Pretty flowers were printed on gowns and pinned to tuxedos. Nevermind that the J.G. Ballard short story that inspired the theme was about an opulent estate under threat of an inevitable advancing mob.
Ms. Seyfried not only read that story, but interpreted the mob as “representing climate change,” her stylist, Elizabeth Stewart, said. “She asked if this dress could be sustainable, which is not always easy, because our business is about the new.”
Prada accepted, creating Ms. Seyfried’s gown from leftover deadstock fabric.
“You do what you can,” Ms. Stewart said, hoping to make what she called a “mini” statement.
The fabric, a crinkly silver satin antique, was repurposed from Prada’s spring 2009 collection. It reminded Ms. Seyfried of metallic textiles she wore while playing Marion Davies, the 1930s film star, in “Mank.”
That is not to say Prada’s design did not incorporate pretty flowers. Ms. Seyfried’s skirt, lifted at her hips by panniers — giving her “hips for days,” she said — was covered in flowers, embroidered in pink and silver and black.
Ms. Seyfried acknowledged that attending the Met Gala was a privilege, and she is grateful for the invitation, but she said the experience can be “very uncomfortable and awkward.” The red-carpet stairs are lonely. She, like most other attendees, cannot bring a guest, and it is a long and winding journey from the car outside to the bar inside.
This year, she was also worried about more than social awkwardness. Amid chaotic global events, including but not limited to climate change, the Met Gala has come to represent grandeur and wealth. (It remains an arts fund-raiser.) Protesters have assembled outside the museum in years past and were expected to assemble again. “It is going to be a target,” Ms. Seyfried said, conflicted.
“It is tricky to celebrate anything in this day and age. But we’re still going to do it, because the world is not going to stop moving. So if we can celebrate something good, we should.
“Ugh, it’s so tricky. Sorry. Anyway.”
