A6ft cat and a surprise appearance by Bill Nighy in his signature dark suit outshone a legion of supermodels in haute couture to be the belles of the ball at the Met Gala celebrating the late Karl Lagerfeld. The tone of a night full of red-carpet curveballs was set by the host, Anna Wintour, who appeared to confirm longstanding romance rumours by making her entrance arm in arm with Nighy. Serena Williams embraced a trend for dramatic celebrity pregnancy reveals, in a bump-hugging black dress draped with ropes of pearls. The rapper Doja Cat’s homage to Choupette, Lagerfeld’s beloved white Burmese cat, included facial prosthetics that gave a feline remodelling to her nose and upper lip, as well as sparkling cat ears and a fluffy train – but was outdone by the giant Choupette who waved to the crowds like a Disney mascot and embraced a nonplussed Lizzo, before the blue-eyed headpiece was removed to reveal Jared Leto inside the costume. Lagerfeld, who famously denounced fashion retrospectives as boring – “I don’t want to see all those old dresses”, he once told the New York Times – would have been delighted by an evening that embraced his genius for turning fashion into mass entertainment, and celebrated the adored pet he described as his “heiress”, and to whom he is thought to have left £1.3m as a token of his affection. Exhibition curators had hoped the red carpet would be a thoughtful tribute to a six-decade career in fashion, with industry insiders duelling over who could unearth the most obscure archive pieces. The event’s co-host Dua Lipa, in a corseted white Chanel gown that was worn on the catwalk in 1992 by Claudia Schiffer, the model Lila Moss in a peach dress from one of the designers last collections for Fendi, and the filmmaker Olivia Wilde, in an iconic violin dress from Lagerfeld’s 1983 collection for Chloé, which has also been worn by front-row favourite Chloë Sevigny, followed the assignment faithfully. But such is the success of the party as a fundraiser – with tickets approximately $50,000, it has been nicknamed “an ATM for the Met” – that while the official dress code this year was dress in honour of Karl, the unspoken dress code of every Met Gala is dress to make headlines. This red carpet mapped out Lagerfeld’s pop culture legacy. The Choupette cameos reflected how the designer, who transformed his catwalks into casinos, airports and icebergs, brought surprise, humour and entertainment to the fashion world. The night confirmed that Lagerfeld’s signature look remains iconic four years after his death, as seen in Cara Delevingne’s powdered silver wig and James McAvoy’s black paper fan, and most immersively in the Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan’s full homage, created in collaboration with the Dior designer Kim Jones, which channeled Lagerfeld right down to the fingerless gloves, black sunglasses and diamante tie-pin. Lagerfeld’s career included long and successful tenures at Fendi, Chloé and his eponymous label, as well as an early stint at Jean Patou. But the night underscored the fact that it is the house of Chanel with which he has a lasting symbiotic relationship. Camellia flowers, pearls and tweed, the motifs of Chanel, made countless appearances. Anne Hathaway’s white tweed strapless gown with matching jacket – made for her by Versace – was a red carpet take on the classic Chanel tweed suit. Cardi B’s dress, by the designer Chen Peng, had camellias encrusted all over fabric quilted in the style of a Chanel 2.55 handbag, while Sean “Diddy” Combs designed his own outfit, which featured 1,000 silk and velvet camellias. Kim Kardashian, who dominated the headlines at the previous Met Gala by undergoing a crash diet in order to wear a dress worn by Marilyn Monroe, had a quiet year by comparison, in a skin-toned Schiaparelli corset strategically draped with 50,000 freshwater pearls.