Bad Bunny added five decades to his face in three hours.
The 32-year-old Grammy winner was virtually unrecognizable on the Met Gala 2026 red carpet Monday, arriving as an 85-year-old version of himself complete with deep-set wrinkles, liver spots, sagging skin and a full head of white curls.
Prosthetics designer Mike Marino — who also transformed Heidi Klum into a living statue for the gala — told Allure that the process began six weeks before the big night.
The build began with a digital scan of the singer’s head, which was used to produce a 3D-printed replica. Marino then used clay on top of the model, carving the texture of aging skin by hand.
“I sculpt every line, every crease, every pore into the clay and that’s what you’ll see on the prosthetics,” he told the outlet.
From those clay molds, his team cast silicone pieces thin enough that the singer could still move and emote naturally. Separate pieces covered his neck, cheeks, forehead, eyelids, earlobes and hands, each airbrushed with blood vessels, shadows and dark spots.
To predict how the singer might actually age, Marino studied elderly Puerto Rican men. He compared his approach to classical portrait painters. “I thought it was cool that, with his grooming, [Bad Bunny] had this distinguished look that was as if a [Diego] Velázquez or [John Singer] Sargent portrait came to life,” he told Allure.
A hand-knotted white wig, eyebrows, a mustache and a beard — crafted by wigmaker Diana Choi and hairstylist Carla Farmer — completed the illusion.
Bad Bunny paired the prosthetics with a custom all-black Zara tuxedo of his own design, featuring a walking cane and an oversized bow that nodded to Charles James’ 1947 “Bustle” gown in the Costume Institute’s permanent collection.
The look nodded to the “Aging Body” section of the Met’s “Costume Art” exhibition, which confronts fashion’s tendency to sideline older bodies. “Perhaps reflecting our fear of having to face our own mortality, the youth-oriented fashion industry has traditionally ignored the aged body,” reads the exhibition catalog.
“Fashion ages. But the art within it doesn’t expire,” Bad Bunny told Vogue. “Of course, our bodies might age, but what we carry inside doesn’t, right?”
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