The Met Gala 2026 took place on May 4 under the theme "Costume Art," with "Fashion Is Art" as the dress code. The dinner is the fundraiser. The main event is the exhibition of the same name that opened May 10, in which the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art fills a new gallery with nearly 400 objects from its own collection and asks why clothing counts as art.

First Monday in May: from a $50 dinner in 1948 to $100,000 a seat

Per Wikipedia's Met Gala entry, the publicist Eleanor Lambert started the gala in 1948 to raise money for the newly founded Costume Institute. The first one was a dinner with $50 tickets. Themes arrived with Diana Vreeland, who became the Institute's consultant in 1972; the first themed gala, "The World of Balenciaga," ran on March 21, 1973, at $85 a ticket.

Anna Wintour has chaired or co-chaired every gala since 1995 except 1996, and Vogue runs the event under her direction. She stepped down as editor-in-chief of American Vogue in June 2025 and moved to the role of Condé Nast's global chief content officer.

Ticket prices track the scale: $30,000 in 2014, $50,000 in 2023, $75,000 in 2024 and 2025, $100,000 in 2026. The guest list runs to roughly 450 to 600 people, and the museum closes to the public for the day.

2026 by the numbers: $42 million and four co-chairs

On May 7, Vogue Business's Madeleine Schulz published a by-the-numbers piece: the 2026 gala raised a record $42 million, up from $31 million the year before. Co-chairs: Anna Wintour, Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams. Honorary chairs were Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos; Saint Laurent was among the sponsors.

The same piece gave two hour counts. Kylie Jenner's Schiaparelli gown took over 11,000 hours of embroidery. Chase Infiniti's Thom Browne dress carried more than 1.5 million stacked sequins.

Two days earlier, on May 5, Vogue's Christian Allaire reported that Nicole Kidman's custom Chanel by Matthieu Blazy took the atelier 800 hours. For what those hours mean in couture terms, see haute couture explained.

Fashion in a museum display case: the Met Gala 2026 Costume Art exhibition treats dress as art

The exhibition: nearly 400 objects, gowns beside armor and vases

Costume Art was announced on November 17, 2025, opened May 10, 2026, and runs to January 10, 2027. Andrew Bolton is the curator; he joined the Costume Institute in 2002 and was named curator in charge on September 8, 2015, succeeding Harold Koda. The nearly 400 pieces all come from the Met's own holdings and include armor and vases alongside gowns.

The room is new. The Condé M. Nast Galleries, about 12,000 square feet next to the Great Hall, opened in 2026 with Costume Art as the first show.

The exhibition splits into two parts, "Diversity in Bodily Being" and "Bodily Being in Its Universality," with sections named for bodies: Reclaimed Body; Disabled Body; Pregnant Body; Corpulent Body; Naked and Nude Body; Classical Body; Abstract Body. The mannequins were custom-made on real people, among them Sinéad Burke and Aimee Mullins.

The Costume Institute was called "Costume Art" in 1937

The title has a history. Irene Lewisohn opened the Museum of Costume Art on Fifth Avenue in 1937. It joined the Met in 1946 as the Costume Institute and became a full curatorial department in 1959. When it absorbed the Brooklyn Museum's costume collection in 2009, the Met's own holdings already stood at 31,000 objects. On May 5, 2014, Michelle Obama opened the renovated space as the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

The department also holds the Met's attendance record. "Heavenly Bodies" in 2018 drew 1,659,647 visitors, the most for any exhibition in the museum's history. "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" in 2011 passed 650,000.

For how sequins traveled from a pharaoh's tomb to a red carpet, see also sequin history.

"Armor and vases among the 400 objects is the curatorial argument in one move: whatever a body wears is form." — Guushu Design Team