Lizzo, the rapper and singer/songwriter who’s also a classically trained flutist, has wide-ranging musical interests and she’s got followers—more than 12 million of them on her main Instagram page alone. She’s performed with the New York Philharmonic in a virtual 2020 graduation ceremony and in a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring an all-twerking orchestra. This May, she showed off her new purchase, a flute named the Dryad’s Touch, at the Metropolitan Museum’s annual fashion gala in Manhattan. The $55,000 gold flute—joining her other flutes, which include the silver Sasha flute, which has its own Instagram account and is named after Beyoncé’s alter ego Sasha Fierce—features nature-inspired artwork. At the Met gala, her gown and black-and-gold coat were designed by Thom Browne, and she wore a necklace evoking the neck rings worn by Zimbabwe’s Ndebele women, with colors nicely picked up by her 18-karat green-gold flute. Lizzo didn’t just pose on the red carpet: she performed a bit of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
Caption: Lizzo makes an entrance—and plays Debussy on her new flute—on the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum’s 2022 fashion gala in NYC. Photo by tomandlorenzo.com.