A TikToker recreated Dua Lipa's vintage Chanel Met Gala dress using only $200 worth of material, inc

• A TikToker who went viral for recreating Dua Lipa's Met Gala dress only spent $200 doing so. 
• Kiana Bonollo said she sourced fabric like curtain fringe to remake the iconic vintage Chanel gown.
• While the original dress would've taken months to make, Bonollo only spent 7 working days on it. 

A TikToker who "gasped" when she saw Dua Lipa wearing a vintage Chanel gown at the 2023 Met Gala created a nearly identical replica for just $200. 

Kiana Bonollo, a 24-year-old content creator and pattern maker from North Carolina, told Insider that she – like many others – habitually tunes in to see arrivals at the annual star-studded Met Gala in New York City. But unlike most people, Bonollo checks out the event to see if there's a dress on the red carpet she can challenge herself to recreate. 

Previously, she posted a TikTok of how she recreated Gigi Hadid's 2021 Met Gala look – a white, strapless Prada gown that had a corset bodice and a layer of black fabric underneath. The clip has since amassed over 7.5 million views. 

Although this year's Met Gala brought out several good contenders, from Anne Hathaway's daring pearl-laden Versace dress to Cardi B's ink-black Chenpeng Studio ballgown, Bonollo said she instantly knew Lipa's was the one when she first laid eyes on it.

"I gasped when I saw her on the screen because it was so gorgeous," Bonollo said. "It didn't immediately register to me that it was a wedding dress, which maybe it should have because it's a big white gown."

As Insider previously reported, Lipa wore a vintage Chanel bridal dress. She accented the dress with an over-100-carat Tiffany necklace that she described as being straight from the vault. The gown was previously worn by model and Karl Lagerfeld muse Claudia Schiffer in 1992.

"I started researching it to see it on the original model and I kept falling more in love with it, the more angles I saw of it," Bonollo added. "And it was so my personal style where it's simple, but it's constructed in a way that's interesting and beautiful without being over the top."

After making her decision, Bonollo decided to make a series of TikTok videos taking her followers through the journey of recreating the gown. 

In the final clip, uploaded on Tuesday, Bonollo tries on the dress and even recreates the pop star's barbed-wire heart to go with it. It already has over 172,000 views as of Thursday.

Bonollo had her work cut out for her recreating Dua Lipa's dress

In the first video of the series, Bonollo heads to the fabric store Joann to source materials such as white tweed and curtain fringe to make the dress – the clip has over 6.1 million views as of Thursday.

The fabric cost her roughly $200, and she also spent an additional $50 for the cage crinoline, which is used to add a stiff structure to the skirt, she told Insider.

However, working with the fabric was actually one of the most challenging parts of the project.

"Honestly, I hate working with tweed," Bonollo said. "It unravels super easily. You have to kind of sew all the edges before you start working with it so it adds double to the sewing time."

Another difficult aspect, which she documented in several TikToks, was getting the corset right. Bonollo said her issue stemmed from the fact that she'd just bought a new dress-form mannequin, which had different proportions to her last one.

"It was hard to get it to fit," she said. At times the torso of the corset appeared too short but then she overcorrected it and it looked way too long. 

After some trial and error, however, Bonollo was able to recreate the structural corset of the Chanel dress to her size with all of the different boning channels and seams.

What's more, Bonollo managed to finish the entire look in just seven working days – a fraction of what she estimates it took the Chanel team to create the original in the 1990s. 

"I'm assuming it took them weeks or months to make, at least weeks, probably months," she said. "I know usually it's a team of people working on big dresses like this."

And while the content creator said she doesn't have any big galas to wear the dress out to coming up, Bonollo does think she'll get some use of it one way or the other, such as potentially repurposing part of the skirt for her own wedding. Bonollo said she's planning to make her own wedding dress for the nuptials, taking place in 2024.

"The chances of me being able to dress out in Raleigh, North Carolina, are slim to none," she said, jokingly. "But at least for this, I can definitely split it up between a corset top and a skirt."

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