Cara Delevingne and Katie Holmes wore very different outfits to the Met Gala this year. Holmes wore a sleeveless dress designed by her date, designer Zac Posen. Cara Delevingne wore a black Stella McCartney jumpsuit.
But Cara Delevingne and Katie Holmes did have something in common about their preparations for the ball. Both featured items that fooled onlookers. In the case of Katie Holmes, it was a bob hairdo that she teased photos of, fooling people into thinking she had cut off her long locks.
For Cara Delevingne it was ink. Seemingly permanent tattoos of plum red flowers with spiraling branches, birds and blossoms and covered Cara Delevingne’s arms and neck, peeking out from the cutouts of her jumpsuit and out from under her bun-up hair.
But these were not permanent tattoos. However they were inked on by the same tattoo artist that has done the permanent ones Cara Delevingne has.
Celebrity tattoo artist Keith “Bang Bang” McCurdy worked with Cara Delevingne to design non-permanent decorative ink for her that would fit with this year’s Costume Institute Gala theme: “China: Through the Looking Glass.”
While the ink job was pretty extensive, McCurdy says Cara Delevingne “wanted the body art to occupy mores space and have her body be covered in it, but we weren’t able to do it with the time constraints.”
“I wanted to do something that added to Cara’s look without stealing the show,” he added. “The Met Gala is a big stage to bring tattoos to and I wanted to do something that worked.”
While Cara Delevingne is certainly not the first person to use paint markers, which stay on for about 10 days, to decorate herself, there is talk that her using this technique so publicly may start a fashion trend.