The countdown to the 2026 Met Gala on 4 May is underway. As always, the evening will celebrate the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring exhibition, which this year focuses on the centrality of the dressed body in The Met’s millennia-deep collection. From the theme to the co-hosts, scroll down for everything you need to know about the Met Gala 2026.
Made possible by Jeff and Lauren Bezos, with other funding from Saint Laurent and Condé Nast, Costume Art will run from 10 May 2026 to 10 January 2027, following the Met Gala on 4 May 2026, which provides the Costume Institute with its primary source of funding for all activities.
Costume Art, the spring 2026 exhibition at the Costume Institute, addresses “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” per curator Andrew Bolton, by pairing paintings, sculptures and other objects spanning the 5,000 years of art represented in The Met, alongside historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute. Bolton has organised the exhibition around a series of thematic body types loosely divided into three categories. These include bodies omnipresent in art, like the classical body and the nude body; other kinds of bodies that are more often overlooked, like ageing bodies and pregnant bodies; and still more that are universal, like the anatomical body.
“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” Bolton says. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and centre in every gallery you come across. Even the nude is never naked,” he continues. “It’s always inscribed with cultural values and ideas.” The exhibition will also mark the inauguration of the nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M Nast Galleries, adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall.
In keeping with recent iterations of fashion’s biggest night of the year, the dress code – Fashion is Art – will allow for a healthy degree of interpretation. While the objectivity of that statement can certainly be debated, the theme makes perfect sense in the given context – after all, the exhibition will see garments placed in dialogue with a range of artworks spanning 5,000 years of art history from the Met’s collection; and, for one night, with a veritable feast of outfits that reinforce the theme’s claim.
Set to co-chair the fête are major forces from the worlds of entertainment, sport, and, of course, fashion: namely, Beyoncé who last walked the Met’s steps in 2016, when she attended the “Manus x Machina” gala in Givenchy Haute Couture Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour. Meanwhile, Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz will co-chair the 2026 Met Gala Host Committee, with additional members including Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Gwendoline Christie, Alex Consani, Misty Copeland, Elizabeth Debicki, Lena Dunham, Paloma Elsesser, LISA, Chloe Malle, Sam Smith, Teyana Taylor, Lauren Wasser, Anna Weyant, A’ja Wilson and Yseult, with more host committee members to be announced at a later date. Read more on the co-chairs, here.
The 2026 Met Gala livestream will be hosted exclusively by Vogue and broadcast live across its digital platforms, as well as on YouTube and TikTok. Bookmark this page, because you’ll be able to watch the livestream from 11pm GMT. Hosts Ashley Graham, La La Anthony and Cara Delevingne will be talking viewers through all the fun and fashion at the 2026 Met Gala, with Emma Chamberlain reprising her role as official red-carpet correspondent.
Organised and presided over by Anna Wintour since 1995, the Met Gala has become a much-loved annual celebration of fashion. A fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, it has traditionally been timed to mark the opening of its annual fashion exhibition. Year after year, the event raises eight-figure sums.
“Boundaries vanish in the new exhibition,” writes Dodie Kazanjian in her exclusive first look at Costume Art for Vogue. “Costume Art is inclusive and collaborative, and the unifying theme is the human body and how it has been depicted – dressed, undressed, decorated, honoured, injured and mourned. In a series of revelatory, often surprising, sometimes purposefully jarring, juxtapositions, the exhibition pairs objects and images with clothing: a 460 BC Greek vessel with a 1920s gown by Fortuny; Albrecht Dürer’s Man of Sorrows with Arms Outstretched with Vivienne Westwood’s Martyr to Love jacket; an 1883 walking dress that appears to have strolled out of Seurat’s study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte; Jean Arp’s and Henry Moore’s curvilinear sculptures with ensembles by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. The exhibition reveals the long and symbiotic relationship between art and fashion – making the case that they are separate but equal art forms.”
“I wanted to present fashion as a lens with which to look at art,” explains Bolton. “I wanted the pairings to be sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual, sometimes political, sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply profound and sometimes light-hearted. When you juxtapose a garment with an artwork, another meaning comes about. Something else happens. I want to focus on that. It’s as if one plus one equals three… Hopefully, the show will empower people to make those connections beyond the walls of the museum.”
In short: it’s a secret. For this reason, guests must abide by the no phone (and, therefore, no social media) policy. However, the rules were famously broken by a cluster of celebrities smoking and taking selfies in the bathroom in 2017. The event usually involves a high-profile performer (from Madonna and Rihanna to Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo), and guests always explore the exhibition before sitting down together for dinner.
The event usually hosts around 600 attendees, although a smaller number attended the 2021 Met Gala, with guests following Covid-19 rules.
With such high-profile stars in attendance, it goes without saying that plenty of thought goes into the seating plan with event organiser Eaddy Kiernan and her team responsible for deciding who sits where. “We start with a seating document when the names come together in December,” Kiernan told Vogue. “The actual seating chart doesn’t come together until about a month before the event, when we get a sense for the layout of the room, and the flow of the evening.”
The 2025 guest list included everyone from Zendaya, Kim Kardashian and Cardi B, to Dua Lipa, Nicole Kidman, Lana del Rey and Jennie Kim. As always, designers attended with muses, like Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier in 2018; Lady Gaga and Brandon Maxwell in 2019; Kate Moss and Kim Jones in 2023.
Over the years, the Met Gala has delivered viral looks that are still being discussed today. Rihanna’s dramatic Guo Pei couture cape and gown in 2015 springs to mind here. What about Lady Gaga’s 16-minute entrance while wearing transformative Brandon Maxwell in 2019? Divine. Other memorable moments? Zendaya in her Joan of Arc-inspired Versace look from 2018 and Kim Kardashian in her archival Jean Louis dress (the very same gown worn by Marilyn Monroe back in 1962, when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr President” to JFK) in 2022.
The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style took the Black dandy as its subject, examining the importance of clothing and style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora. The first Costume Institute exhibition since 2003’s Men in Skirts to focus exclusively on menswear, the show was inspired by co-curator Monica Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, in which she establishes Black dandyism as both an aesthetic and political construct. How did this play out on the red carpet? The 2025 dress code was “Tailored for You”, and you can revisit all the looks via last year’s livestream, which saw Teyana Taylor, La La Anthony and Ego Nwodim host proceedings. Scan through the entire gallery of red-carpet moments here.
This article was originally published on British Vogue.
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