On Saturday, Nishimura and the six other models gathered at Madonna’s Manhattan home to prepare for The Met, where they met the singer for the first time. “She was extremely sweet. She’s a consummate professional and a true diva in the positive sense,” she says. “She had the gravitas and that professionalism that I think we all admire.”
Once the pop star put on the cape and Philip Treacy hat (the milliner even FaceTimed in for the fitting), they got to work. “We rehearsed only four or so times, and we just assigned our spots,” Nishimura says.
On Monday, the group returned to Madonna’s house, where they got ready in her rehearsal space. “We were all oohing and ahhing over each other’s dresses,” she says. Then, a Sprinter van whisked them away to The Met, where they arrived between Bad Bunny and Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner.
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By the time they arrived, “there was a huge queue of celebrities and designers and people waiting to still go up the steps,” Nishimura says, counting Marc Jacobs and Alexa Chung. But they breezed straight past the line. “Celebrity is sort of like Mount Olympus,” Nishimura says. “Madonna’s still a queen there, and we’re just her nymphs.”
The singer had the steps to herself for her five-minute performance, complete with a custom soundtrack. “It’s funny; I wasn’t nervous at all,” she says. “The moment wasn’t really about us. It was about us as a collective, which makes things a lot less scary.”
So what does one do after they’ve just escorted Madonna up the Met Gala steps? “We had to take the cape back down the steps,” she says. What happened next could send even the gods crashing down to earth: “At the end, Beyoncé turns the corner,” Nishimura says. “The photographer started screaming at us, ‘Get out of the shot! You’re ruining the shot!’”
