The first time Ali Wong tried on her 2024 SAG Awards dress, her stylist’s assistant fell to the floor in awe. “I have a pretty good game face,” says Tara Swennen, Wong’s stylist. “I try and let my clients have an emotion before I show mine.” But this wasn’t one of those times. “All three of my assistants and [I] just gasped the moment she put it on.”
Tonight, Wong is wearing the closing look from Iris van Herpen’s fall 2023 couture show: a black-and-white gabardine and satin column dress covered in tessellating florals that crawl up a tulle illusion mock neck. But the pièce de résistance is the massive set of cascading fiberglass wings sprouting lacy, geometric petals, which affix to the sleeves of the dress. “The striking finale dress for Ali Wong is created to dance dramatically with her and to come alive when she moves, the silhouette is shifting shape around her like an underwater being,” van Herpen tells Vogue.
Swennen had originally planned for Wong—who has been sweeping up awards all season for her starring role in Beef—to wear the dress to the Golden Globes or the Emmys. But thanks to the dress’s six-foot wingspan, logistics (from red carpets to seating arrangements) forced them to hit pause. Luckily, the two made a contingency plan in time for the SAGs, the last major award ceremony of Wong’s season. “This dress required a major carpet, and so I said, We can do some Tetris,” Swennen says. “I have to get a pass to go with her [to the red carpet.] We’ll have her do the carpet, and then I’m going to remove [the wings] and take them home myself.”
Swennen knew that the dress was a perfect fit for Wong the second she laid eyes on it. “It’s an exquisite piece of art. I love the architecture of it all, I love the movement of it all—the idea of it swaying down the carpet,” she says. “I just knew that she was the fearless person that was going to pull it off.” While fashion is a more recent venture for Wong, Swennen admires that she’s willing to dive in headfirst. “Ali is someone who not only is a chameleon, but really, really loves to take risks and have fun with fashion. It’s something that I think is fairly new to her and she’s really embracing it,” she adds. “And as a stylist, it’s a dream.”
