Pamela Anderson on Her Met Gala Debut: ‘I Am Playing Me’

“You might have to sew them on to me,” Ms. Anderson said during the fitting, which was at the de la Renta offices on 42nd street. “It’s OK. I’ve been through worse.”

Oh, and she was wearing (light) makeup again, thanks to Pat McGrath, and Orlando Pita did her hair. “My mother will be so happy,” Ms. Anderson said.

“I really do feel like a princess,” she continued. “Or like a tree spirit. I don’t know, maybe a gnome? It’s just so elegant. So sophisticated. All those things that we aspire to be and fall short of. I feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, if this is the last picture ever taken in my life, I’m happy.’”

In a way, she has been preparing for it since she decided to wipe her face clean of makeup, bare her soul to the world in her documentary and memoir, and take control of her own story. Thinking, she said, “if I’m good enough for my dogs and my garden, good enough for the grocery store, then I’m good enough to go walk on a red carpet without a stitch of makeup on. It was very freeing.”

Women, she said, have come up to her on the street to thank her. “I thought, ‘I’m just waiting for my next incarnation,’” she said. “I don’t mind being the experiment.”

In the past, she said, she had “tried to dress like a grown-up when I wasn’t there yet. I just didn’t know how to put it all together.” She has some old Yves Saint Laurent and Alaïa, along with a bunch of “rubber dresses,” in storage bins back on Vancouver Island, where she lives with her two Labradors, one golden retriever, and a 5,000-square-foot vegetable and rose garden. Her parents live in another cabin on the property. At her Met fitting she joked that she had gone “from pickles to pearls.” (She does a lot of pickling.) “That’s your next book,” said Brandon Thomas Lee, the older of her two sons, who was with her in New York.