There’s a certain thrill in watching Kim Kardashian play fashion archivist, especially when she treats legendary pieces with the same casual energy most people reserve for a weekend slip dress. Back in 2020, she stole the Oscar after-party spotlight in Alexander McQueen’s famed “oyster” dress. Five years later, instead of placing the memory behind museum glass like the rest of us would, she went hunting for another treasure from that same spring 2003 “Irere” show… only to end up wearing it in the ocean at night.
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In Rio de Janeiro for her new legal drama All’s Fair, Kim stepped out in a nude sheer McQueen dress with braided straps, a pleated corseted bodice and a skirt that looked deliciously undone, the kind of intentional unraveling that whispers rather than shouts. Collectors call it the “shipwreck” dress, partly because its beauty sits somewhere between ruin and romance, and partly because the original runway film showed a model escaping a sinking boat with this exact dress clinging dramatically to her body.
But Kim didn’t settle for suggestion. She went straight into the water, waves and all, letting the decades-old piece darken, float, and soak as if it were made for late-night rituals. The internet gasped. Khloé scolded her in the comments, insisting the water was too dark, too risky, too everything. But that’s the thing about Kim: once she decides a moment deserves magic, practicality becomes background noise.
It’s likely she owns this one outright, tucked somewhere inside that ever-growing archive of hers where gowns live like artifacts and memories. What’s becoming clear is that she has a soft spot for McQueen’s “Irere” era, the one inspired by explorers, conquistadors and the Indigenous Amazon, where couture technique met raw storytelling. This was also the collection that introduced the now-iconic skull print and the rosary heels Rosalía revived in her Berghain video. A commercially clever, emotionally charged McQueen—rare and unforgettable.
And here’s the full-circle detail only true fashion lovers appreciate: both the “oyster” dress she wore in 2020 and this ocean-soaked “shipwreck” piece were once part of the Met’s 2011 Savage Beauty exhibition. Only two versions of each exist. One pair belongs to the museum. The other pair now lives with Kim Kardashian, who apparently sees no harm in letting hers touch saltwater in the moonlight. That’s the beauty of her style at its best—archival, audacious, slightly unhinged, deeply intentional. Fashion that breathes. Fashion that lives.
