Sarah Paulson walked the 2026 Met Gala carpet on 4 May wearing a gown built to mock the ultra-wealthy, at an event chaired by one of the richest men alive, and charged £73,500 ($100,000) per head to attend.

The American Horror Story actress, 51, wore Look 27 fromMatières Fécales' Fall/Winter 2026 collection, 'The ONE Percent,' a runway shown in Paris on 3 February 2026 that was built from the ground up as a ferocious critique of extreme wealth and the systems that protect it. The look featured a red-grey tulle ball gown with exaggerated, theatrical proportions, white opera gloves, Boucheron jewellery, and its most talked-about element: a one-dollar bill taped across Paulson's eyes.

Online, the reaction split immediately, with one camp calling the look performance art and another pointing out that staging a critique of billionaire excess at a£73,500-a-ticket ($100,000-a-ticket) galaco-chaired by Jeff Bezos was not the contradiction-free statement it was intended to be.

To understand why Paulson's choice landed so divisively, the collection itself demands scrutiny. Matières Fécales, the label founded by Montreal-born duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran,staged 'The ONE Percent' at the Palais Brongniart in Parison 3 February 2026.

The show drew directly from an Oxfam study showing that the world's richest 1% hold almost half of global wealth. It was not a vague aesthetic gesture. It was a specific, sourced political argument rendered in fabric.

The collection unfolded in three acts. The first dissected bourgeois archetypes through distorted 'New Look' silhouettes and semi-couture pieces. Key props included the 'Guilt Gloves,' white lambskin opera gloves with blood-red stained palms, developed in collaboration with Christian Louboutin, and the dollar-bill masks, which models wore taped across their eyes to literalise the idea of being blinded by money.

The second act shifted to community, using jersey hoodie capes to acknowledge the subcultural network the brand had built. The third, 'The Immortals,' featured Dalton herself closing the show in a look originally conceived for their graduate project twelve years earlier, which had assigned students the same title for the year 2026.

Parisian label Matières Fécales (also known as Fecal Matter), founded by Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, presented their Fall/Winter 2026-2027 show, titled "The One Percent," on 3 March 2026 at the Palais Brongniart in Paris.pic.twitter.com/2kc8i1AJdY

The show notes,as published by NSS Magazine, stated: 'Power concerns us all. Whether it is corrupted by those who govern us or absent when we need it most, we all have a relationship with it, and that is precisely what this collection is about.' 10 Magazine, covering the runway, summarised the show's closing note this way: 'This story of power comes to an end and as we have seen in history time after time, too much power can eclipse our humanity. Perhaps that's why we aren't born gods.' The collection did not hedge its message. Power, it argued, is grotesque, and wealth is its most reliable mask.

The designers' own backstory sharpens the work's credibility. Bhaskaran grew up in Montreal's working-class Cartierville neighbourhood; Dalton in the affluent enclave of Westmount.Their contrasting upbringings, as WWD reported, were the emotional engine of the collection, giving 'The ONE Percent' a biographical dimension that most political fashion lacks. This was not a label cynically borrowing the language of inequality. It was two designers processing their own lived experience of class through couture.

Source: International Business Times UK