Indian billionaire Sudha Reddy wears $10m diamond necklace to the 2024 Met Gala

Indian billionaire Sudha Reddy wore perhaps the most expensive piece of jewellery to the 2024 Met Gala – and it was even from her own collection.

Reddy, the director of the MEIL Group and wife of businessman PV Krishna Reddy, attended the annual Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday 6 May. For the event, she wore an ivory silk gown custom made by Indian deisgner Tarun Tahiliani. The handcrafted dress – which featured a corseted bodice with a mini portrait of Reddy – took more than 4,500 people to complete.

If the entrepreneur’s embroidered white gown wasn’t impressive enough, it was Reddy’s 180-carat diamond necklace that stole the show. According to Town & Country magazine, the jaw-dropping piece is called the “Amore Eterno” and was gifted to Reddy by her husband for their 25th wedding anniversary.

The necklace is worth a whopping $10m and features four large, heart-shaped diamonds connected by 21 luminescent round diamonds. Speaking to the outlet, Reddy explained that she crafted the piece with the help of jewellery designer Farah Khan Ali.

“The largest of the four heart-shaped diamonds represents my husband, Krishna, while the next one is myself, and the other two adjacent ones represent our sons, Pranav and Manas,” she said. “The necklace, for me, stands for an everlasting bond of love and connection. I think it matches my heart-shaped ring well and I’m always about the passion and positivity so it’s natural for the hearts to be my favorite designs.”

In addition to her diamond necklace, Reddy wore two rings to the Met Gala – one with a 23-carat yellow diamond and another with 20-carat heart-shaped diamond – also both from her personal collection.

The philanthropist noted that her Met Gala ensemble was meant to serve as a metaphor for India’s artistic revival by showcasing handcrafted Indian design. “The outfit conjures imagery of a blossoming garden, inviting the viewer to embrace authenticity in an ever-changing world,” Reddy said. “A metaphor for India as a sleeping beauty that is reawakening, the outfit celebrates the timelessness of heritage workmanship, transcendence of temporal boundaries and the eternal cycle of renewal and regeneration.”

Reddy has been a longtime supporter of the Met Costume Institute and the museum’s South Asian arts programming. She attended her first Met Gala in 2021, celebrating its “In America: A Lexicon Of Fashion” exhibit, where she wore a Falguni Shane Peacock Haute Couture gown.

This year, the theme for the Met Gala was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”. The fashion extravaganza coincided with the opening of the Costume Institute’s exhibit, which is centred around 50 historically significant pieces of fashion - some too fragile ever to be worn again. Nearly 250 items were drawn from the Costume Institute’s permanent collection, featuring designs from Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, and Givenchy to span 400 years of fashion history.

Much like every year, this year’s Met Gala also came with its own dress code, loosely labelled “The Garden of Time”. The dress code takes inspiration from a short story of the same title, written by JG Ballard in 1962, which focuses on the theme of fleeting beauty. Attendees were encouraged to wear items that captured the essence of the short story – such as florals to represent an actual garden, or items that signify the passing of time like clocks and sand.

Read The Independent’s list of best dressed guests at the 2024 Met Gala for more.