The 2026 MTV VMAs might have taken over Los Angeles on Sunday, but the weekend’s biggest music-fashion moment might still belong to Olivia Rodrigo.

Rodrigo entered the winter section of her “The Unraveled Tour” at PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford, Conn., in a pale blue collared minidress with a sleeveless bodice, fitted waistband and sharply pleated skirt. Then the rain started.

As she performed “The Cure,” water soaked the custom Hussein Chalayan dress until its outer layer clung to her body and began breaking apart in irregular, translucent strips, exposing red lace corsetry underneath.

The disappearing dress made for the tour opener’s biggest fashion moment, but it wasn’t an idea that appeared out of nowhere. Back in May, Rodrigo released the music video for “The Cure,” where she first comes undone.

In the music video, Rodrigo plays a nurse inside a handmade hospital of cardboard, fabric and yarn, dressed in a custom Dilara Findikoglu button-up dress with puffed sleeves, a custom Stephen Jones nurse’s hat and an “Olivia” heart name tag by O.P.P. Jewelry.

After she pricks her finger with a needle, red yarn meant to stand in for blood begins streaming from her body as she physically unravels, which you can see around the 2:18 mark in the video. Rodrigo called “The Cure” the “thesis statement” of her album when the video was released back in May.

Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo styled both the video and the tour, and that unraveling imagery was part of Chalayan’s brief from the beginning.

“I had previously made dissolving dresses for my SS2016 collection, ‘Pasatiempo,’” Chalayan told WWD via email. “In reference to this work, I was approached by Olivia’s team to design a piece in response to her song ‘The Cure,’ exploring the idea of revealing a sense of vulnerability as the upper layer dissolves. This seemed very poetic and compelling to me.”

For his spring 2016 collection, Chalayan had two models stand beneath showers in what appeared to be white paper lab coats. Once the water came down, the outer garments disintegrated to reveal delicate cocktail dresses underneath.

Rodrigo’s version required its own development process.

“I designed a mini range, from which one design was selected, and we then went through a number of iterations to make sure the dress would be practical for the performance, including how it would look and function before the dissolution took place,” Chalayan said. “I worked closely with Chenelle Delgadillo throughout the development, with Olivia approving each step of the process.”

The simplicity of the pale outer dress was intentional.

“There is an outer dress, which I wanted to keep very simple and pure, so that the reveal would be more powerful,” Chalayan said. “It is made from a special paper-like material that dissolves when it comes into contact with water, revealing a contrasting colour lace and tulle corseted dress underneath.”

Making a dress dissolve was one thing. Making it dissolve at the right speed while Rodrigo continued singing underneath pouring water was another.

“The timing was definitely a challenge, as Olivia also has to be able to sing while under the water,” Chalayan said. “There has therefore been a lot of back and forth and testing to get the timing and dissolution to happen in the right way.”

Chalayan also worked with Joel Jolibe and his team on the construction of the dress.

The experiment sits squarely within a career spent asking clothes to do things beyond simply being worn. Chalayan’s best-known designs include his fall 2000 coffee table that transformed into a skirt and a spring 2000 molded dress whose panels opened by remote control.

“I really challenge myself,” Chalayan told WWD in 2019. “I am definitely doing things that, in the beginning, I thought I might not be able to manage.” He added, “Risk-taking has always been a big factor for me.”

While we don’t know whether or not Chalayan and Rodrigo’s styling team are working on any other dissolving dresses for the rest of the tour, we do know that everything else she is wearing still deserves its own spotlight, too.

Rodrigo built the rest of opening night around the show’s seasonal structure. For spring, she opened amid a field of flowers in a custom Dilara Findikoglu take on the designer’s “The Girl in a Room” dress, a white babydoll mini finished with lace and ribbon details.

Summer traded that softness for a cropped graphic top and hot pink micro shorts, which carried her through songs including “My Way” and “Serena Joy.” By autumn, she had changed again, this time into a purple leather minidress by R&M Leathers with a matching choker for a run that included “Stupid Song,” “Maggots for Brains,” “Traitor,” “Begged” and “Cigarette Smoke.”

Winter brought the Chalayan dress, along with some of the show’s quieter material, before Rodrigo circled back to spring for the encore.

Still wet from “The Cure,” she stripped things down to a fitted white ribbed tank and relaxed, low-rise blue jeans for “Deja Vu,” “All-American Bitch” and “Expectations.” The sequence moved between Rodrigo’s familiar babydoll dresses, leather, tiny shorts and jeans, but the Chalayan look was the only costume designed to change form while she was still wearing it.

Those sweeter shapes, tougher leather pieces and handmade details have been running through Rodrigo’s current cycle beyond the tour. At her inaugural Daisy Chain Fields festival in August, she performed in a lacy white minidress with daisy accessories and tan lace-up boots. Ahead of the festival, she wore a custom pale pink raw-silk minidress by Ramallah-based Nöl Collective, finished with traditional Palestinian tatreez embroidery depicting birds and linked daisies.

Rodrigo has plenty of opportunities to put the wardrobe through its paces. “The Unraveled Tour” kicked off with two sold-out shows in Hartford on Sept. 25 and 26 and will take her across North America, Europe and the U.K. through May 10, 2027, when she closes out the run at London’s O2. Wolf Alice, Devon Again, the Last Dinner Party, Grace Ives and Die Spitz are splitting opening duties across the tour, which spans 86 dates and 28 stops in support of Rodrigo’s third album, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.”