While some spend their senior year of college preparing for finals, emerging designer Elias Matso used it to sculpt a corset dress for Jenna Ortega. On October 19, the 24-year-old's work paid off: The actor debuted the finale look of Matso's "Melt with Me" thesis collection, for Italy's Polimoda fashion school, at the New York screening of Klara and the Sun.
Having made a name for pushing the boundaries of bustiers, Matso started making the dress in late November 2025, taking the "guts of a corset and turning it into the embellishment of the dress," he tells Marie Claire. Matso's final college collection drew inspiration from the Canadian painter Mark Ranger: "If you zoom in on the painted metal pieces, they sort of evoke [his] color scheme and movement." Meanwhile, the fringe skirt paid homage to the late Bob Mackie: "The dress has drama."
The multicolored look was constructed from steel bones, hidden beneath the bodysuit's beige shell, which was covered in even more iron. "Steel boning comes by the yard, but I chopped it into thousands of pieces and painted some of them," he says. "Then, each one was crimped with boning caps [which] are usually used to shield the body from the sharp metal ends."
To slice the spiral and flat steel boning into the many teeny-tiny bands, Matso required, freelancers, friends, and "family members over Christmas" helped bring the look to life over the course of 300 hours. "If you look at those little metal pieces, each [one] involved someone putting their entire body weight into two pairs of wires to create that little thing because it's held together with force," he adds.
He then topped the look with 6,500 blue, pink, and clear crystals, courtesy of Preciosa, a Czech Republic-based brand beloved by Céline Dion, Zendaya, and Jennifer Lopez, as well as designers like Tom Ford, Gucci, and Vivienne Westwood.
Since starting work on it last year, Matso has refined the dress over the months and in six different cities. "Whenever it gets shipped, because it's so heavy, it becomes very delicate... it'll tear itself apart," he says. "I've done repairs on this dress over and over again."
With this in mind, when Ortega wore the look, Matso was on hand to mend the crystal and metal bits to perfection. "I was running around backstage with two sets of needle-nose pliers and super glue," he says. "When my hand isn't strong enough to crimp these metal pieces securely enough, which happens sometimes because of the limitations of my human body, I definitely have to implement some super glue."
Matso designed dresses for Lizzo, Tyla, Sarah Paulson, Shay Mitchell, and more. So, it's no surprise that other celebrity stylists requested it. But after connecting with Ortega's longtime stylist, Enrique Melendez, in May 2026, he "kept it for them."
According to Matso, Melendez showed the design to Ortega last month—and "she was really down. We only met in person for the first time for a fitting the day before the red carpet," he says. It was almost perfect, but "I rushed my little butt off to get those [alterations] done before the next day."
Not only did the look fit Ortega like a glove, but it slipped into her Klara and the Sun press tour style with ease. In the film adaptation of the dystopian science fiction novel, the actor portrays Klara, an "artificial friend".
"The movie challenges the capacity of technology," says Matso. In that same vein, "the dress incorporates the irreplaceable quality of handcrafted [fashion] with how it's made," he says. "But how it is being platformed only exists because of the internet, technology, and in some ways, the algorithm." Melendez also told Matso that the steel bits reminded him of "computer chips."
Making the design even more method, "there is a ray of movement with the embellishment, and this quality of the way that light moves," he says. "I amped up the yellow [paint] this weekend, right before she put it on."
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While their interactions may have been brief, the dress, without a doubt, left as much of a mark on Ortega as it did the viewers: "This is a one-of-one dress. It’s made out of steel rods. So it’s handmade, human-made, a lot of effort," she told People on the red carpet. "I’ve just met the designer, and he’s so special and so cool."