What’s the best Met Gala theme of all time? It’s a fun litmus test for anyone who loves fashion, art, and celebrities (or all of the above!) and a tough question indeed. The theme of the annual fundraising event aligns with the yearly spring exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, and it informs the dress code. For the Met Gala 2026, the theme is “Costume Art,” and the dress code is “Fashion is Art.”
So what can we expect to see from this year’s attendees? Will it be naked dressing all the way? Trompe l’oeil looks, like Jean Paul Gaultier’s signature graphic bodycon dresses? Statuesque gowns? Tune in to Vogue’s exclusive red carpet livestream, hosted by Ashley Graham, La La Anthony, and Cara Delevingne, plus returning red carpet correspondent Emma Chamberlain, on Monday, May 4, to find out.
In the meantime, below, check out each year’s Met Gala theme dating back to 1995, the first year that Anna Wintour became a chair of the event.
Hosted by co-chairs Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, this year’s Met Gala celebrates the Costume Institute’s spring 2026 exhibition, “Costume Art.” The event which is a fundraiser for the Costume Institute will also inaugurate the new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot space on the first floor of the museum, which will serve as the permanent home of the Costume Institute. This spring’s exhibition will consider depictions of the dressed body from across the museum’s curatorial departments, pairing art objects with garments.
Last year’s Met Gala was a celebration of the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” It was organized by head curator Andrew Bolton with guest curator Monica Miller, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Barnard College and Columbia University and author of the prizewinning 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Bolton referred to the 2022 death of legendary Black dandy and longtime Vogue editor André Leon Talley as “the catalyst for the show,” and several guests paid tribute to Talley with looks that explored the finer points of suiting and tailoring (all too apropos, given that the exhibition was the first since 2003 to focus exclusively on menswear).
Approximately 250 items drawn from the Costume Institute’s permanent collection (some rarely seen in public before) were exhibited in brand-new ways for the Spring 2024 exhibition dubbed “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.” The night’s dress code, “The Garden of Time,” was drawn from a J.G. Ballard story about a count who to stave off an angry mob nearing his castle cuts a rose from his garden to slow down time until there are no flowers remaining, and appropriately enough, many guests incorporated florals(groundbreaking!) into their 2024 Met Gala looks.
2023’s Met Gala was in honor of Karl Lagerfeld, the polymath designer whose six-decade career changed fashion industry as we know it. Featuring 150 pieces spanning from 1950 to 2019 which included top jobs at Chloé, Fendi, Chanel, and his own eponymous label the exhibit explores his creative process and, therefore, legacy. Yet the show, stresses The Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton, isn’t a retrospective. “We didn’t want to emphasize Karl the man, who has long been the subject of breathless mythologizing, largely the result of his own self-invention,” he told the press in his opening remarks. Instead, they focused on the many concepts that governed his genius, organized by visual lines crafted by famed architect Tadao Ando. “The serpentine line signified his historicist, romantic, and decorative impulses, and the straight line denoted his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies,” Bolton added.
“In America: An Anthology of Fashion” was the second part of the Metropolitan Museum's examination of American fashion. (The first, “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” debuted in September 2021 and served as the theme for that year's Met Gala.) Whereas “Lexicon” was an expansive look at American fashion as a whole especially its younger designers Anthology acted as a historical retrospective on both the designs and the stories of their makers. “The stories really reflect the evolution of American style, but they also explore the work of individual tailors, dress-makers, and designers,” Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, explains. “What’s exciting for me is that some of the names will be very familiar to students of fashion like Charles James, Halston, and Oscar de la Renta, but a lot of the other names really have been forgotten, overlooked, or relegated to the footnotes of fashion history.”
Andrew Bolton, The Costume Institute’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, told Vogue he centered the 2021 event around the question “Who gets to be American?” which was originally posed on a red, white, and blue silk sash from Prabal Gurung’s 10th anniversary collection. “American designers are at the forefront of conversations around diversity, inclusivity, sustainability, gender fluidity, and body positivity,” he said. “The framework of the show enables us to focus on the younger designers who are engaging thoughtfully and deeply with those ideas.” The exhibition included over 100 pieces from American designers, ranging from Marc Jacobs to La Réunion.
Guests, who included co-chairs Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka, abided by the night's official dress code: American independence.
The 2020 gala was postponed indefinitely due to the pandemic, but its theme is still worth revisiting: In honor of the Met’s 150th anniversary, “About Time” took a look back at a century-and-a-half’s worth of fashion. Bolton found inspiration in Orlando, the 1992 film based on the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. “What I like about Woolf’s version of time is the idea of a continuum,” Bolton said. “There’s no beginning, middle, or end. It’s one big fat middle. I always felt the same about fashion. Fashion is the present.”
For 2019’s exhibition, Bolton drew on Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp’.” The essay describes a sensibility marked by performance, excess, and a kind of winking bad taste exemplified by figures like Oscar Wilde and outré aesthetic movements such as Art Nouveau. Among the pieces on display were dazzling looks from Off-White, Schiaparelli, Moschino, Dior, Thom Browne, and lots more.
2018’s divine theme had hundreds of holy items on display, including dozens of artifacts and objects sent over from the Vatican (most of which had never seen the light beyond Rome). Guests rose to the occasion at the annual gala, with Rihanna dressing as the pope and Katy Perry as an angel (wings and all).
The Met Gala toasted the legendary Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo and featured her “objects,” as she likes to call them. Some guests, like Rihanna and Caroline Kennedy, stuck to the theme and sported original pieces, while others interpreted the topic through other designers. The event was co-chaired by Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams.
The exclusive event went back to the future with tech at the forefront. Stars like Claire Danes literally lit up the ball in a glowing gown, while Emma Watson wore a five-piece Calvin Klein Collection set, which was made from recycled plastic bottles. The exhibition itself focused on the dichotomy between handmade and machine-made fashion, displaying more than 100 pieces of haute couture and ready-to-wear.
The gala celebrated China’s influence on Western fashion with a theme fit for an emperor. The exhibition was a joint effort between the head of the museum’s Department of Asian Art and the Costume Institute, showing looks from Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Christian Dior Haute Couture. Attendees from George and Amal Clooney to Rihanna (wearing a stunning yellow robe by Chinese designer Guo Pei) dressed on-theme for a night at the museum.
The museum celebrated a major figure in the fashion world, but one less known to the general public. The Charles James theme was lively and highly anticipated, with a display of 100 of his most important designs. Co-chaired by Sarah Jessica Parker, Bradley Cooper, and Oscar de la Renta, the party was filled with ball gowns of the sleek and larger-than-life variety.
From designer retrospectives to celebrations of the supernatural, see all the themes of the last two decades, below:
2013: “Punk: Chaos to Couture”
2012: “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”
2011: “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”
2010: “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity”
2009: “The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion”
2008: “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy”
2007: “Poiret: King of Fashion”
2006: “AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion”
2005: “The House of Chanel”
2004: “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century”
2003: “Goddess: The Classical Mode”
2002: No theme
2001: “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years”
2000: No theme
1999: “Rock Style”
1998: “Cubism and Fashion”
1997: “Gianni Versace”
1996: “Christian Dior”
1995: “Haute Couture”
This article was originally published on Vogue US.
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