Met Gala-Goers Pick Classic Looks in 2026’s Fashion Feast

I first wrote about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute fundraising gala in 2024 after a friend said it was “very liberal of me” to consider fashion — the clothes we wear — as art. I’m neither liberal nor conservative but serenely commonsensical in all things. There’s good and bad art and every gradation in between, but of course fashion is art. It’s human expression, conceptual and designed. At its tippity top, it’s crafted via the medium’s highest standards and meant to be seen. The human body is the canvas, and this canvas moves, not like the air moves a Calder stabile but through human muscle and will. It’s got to be the most immediate art since it responds to the times so fast. Materials are often sublime and edgy, gold or silver thread, rare fabrics, and unorthodox materials. At the 2024 gala, one celebrity wore a sand dress.

This year, the gala theme is wide open. It’s “Fashion as Art,” complementing the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster exhibition, which this year is called Costume Art, pairing art from the Met with objects from the Costume Institute. On Monday, I was glued to Vogue’s channel as it filmed more than 300 guests walking the red carpet that leads up the Met’s front steps. Women often had to be sewn or molded into their dresses. A trip to the powder room? No tinkle till ten is the rule for most.

Kendall Jenner, Bruce Jenner’s daughter and a supermodel, got into the spirit of the gala with her Zac Posen dress based on Winged Victory at the Louvre, depicting Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. It’s a Hellenistic sculpture but, art history aside, it’s peak Greek wet drapery. Posen reconceived it in a lightweight blend of cotton and viscose, a tea-dyed jersey for the bared-breast look, and organza. I saw The Devil Wears Prada, a good enough movie, and the very lame sequel. The character based on Anna Wintour is a perfectionist and passionate, both traits I admire, and the barbs she tosses are soft bossy-bitch porn. She’s a pushover compared with, say, Mrs. Danvers, Lady Macbeth, or Cruella de Vil. Jenner and Posen instead channel Funny Face, that supremely better fashion movie. There, Audrey Hepburn does a turn with a dress inspired by Winged Victory, but the look is good for any era, which makes sculpture and dress great art.

Most of the gala-goers drew from the Met’s collection. Some looked very weird. After studying Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea painting of an artist breathing life into marble, the Broadway producer Jordan Roth enlisted designer Robert Wu and came with a 3-D figure on his back. Roth called it “a moment of transcendence.” Yes, there are huge celebrities there, and, yes, Beyoncé, one of the co-chairs, wore a faux-diamond-embellished skeleton dress as a salute to the Met’s art of the Dance of Death, a Medieval-era staple in which a dancing skeleton escorts the living to eternity. A long-feathered opera coat and a crown tag her as the empress of whatever world she happens to occupy. Madonna went not Gothic but Goth, with a St. Laurent black slip dress, a translucent violet organza cape, and a black hat topped with a black ghost ship. It refers to a surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington.

The Met Gala is, many say, the zenith of the New York season’s social world and the art world’s biggest fundraiser. Last year, it made a record $31 million for the Costume Institute, its fashion department holding 33,000 costumes and accessories from the 15th century to today. The attendees aren’t exactly from the old Four Hundred. Years ago, William F. Buckley’s wife, Pat, chaired it, and the great and the good were there in force, with acres of organza, tulle, chiffon, and velvet, heirloom jewels freed from the vault, and, oh, the weeks of dieting and exercising and months of nip and tuck. Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1988 to 2025, has co-chaired the event since 1997 but, as a practical matter, runs it. Partiers now are crossroads types, not blood aristocrats or strictly high-finance but people on the crossroads of the worlds of film, Broadway, music, sports, publishing, tech, business, politics, and, of course, fashion.

The mayor has always gone, at least to the dinner, but this year Mayor Mamdani wasn’t there. Wintour is said to have vetoed his Mao suit, pistol tucked under his red waist band. “Zoh,” she said, “you wear that at home all the time.” The gala is for fancy dress, not your casual commie attire. “And no guns allowed at the Met,” she added, only her 9-mm Diamondback, in case someone like me shows up wearing plaid flannel and white socks. Actually, Mamdani ditched the gala because it celebrates rich people. Lady Mamdani is busy making IEDs for Hezbollah, or is it Hamas? So much to bother her pretty pea brain. Present and representing the forces of execrability were the race pimp Al Sharpton, Mark Zuckerberg, the younger members of the Soros dynasty, and Eileen Gu, who, to her credit, wore a short Iris van Herpen dress made from 15,000 glass bubbles. It took 3,000 hours for Uyghur slaves to make it. Only kidding! I don’t know who made it. Gu’s only accessory was a device that made bubbles in her wake. I loved it.

The actress Sarah Paulson wore a gray-tulle-ribbon gown by the French indie label Matières Fécales. Slips easily off the tongue, doesn’t it, until you realize it means “Fecal Matter,” or shit in English. They’re fashion satirists. The ribbon edges are tattered. A big bow is too big and crooked. Gray can mean lots of things, among them detachment, compromise, and ambiguity. Paulson wore a dollar-bill blindfold, apparently as a protest of the event, which, she feels, is blinded by money. A ticket to the gala is $100,000, and tables are $350,000. Paulson wasn’t seen after her walk on the red carpet. We think Wintour shot her.

Wintour wore a turquoise-and-black embroidered Chanel gown with a feathery jacket, channeling Art Nouveau style. The ruby-red Chanel gown with sequins and feathers, worn by fellow co-chairwoman Nicole Kidman, saluted both love and the Big Apple. Jeff and Lauren Bezos were the honorary co-chairs and sponsors. They’re said to have made a $10 million gift. There were the inevitable tinny protests. Dirty money, blah, blah, blah. Sacked Washington Post reporters are among those at a Ball Without Billionaires, nose rings, green hair, and rage-induced bile a must. Hey, dopes, and you’re losers and bores, too, the Bezoses just gave millions to a good cause. Give it a rest. The fashion house Saint Laurent and publisher Condé Nast are sponsors, too. Mrs. Bezos was drawn to Sargent’s Madame X, wearing a Schiaparelli gown with a fallen jeweled strap. I like Mrs. Bezos. She’s from Albuquerque, she seems down to earth, and she spoke well.

Of the dozen co-hosts, the only one I’d heard of is Lena Dunham. I adore her parents, the superb artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and Lena was, believe it or not, a very sweet child. Dunham’s over-the-top red Valentino gown, with lots of sequins and crow’s feathers, is, she said, meant to represent the blood spurting from the head of Holofernes as Judith cuts it off, as depicted in Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting in the Met’s collection.

Dunham is a shock jock, but the shocks this year, unlike those of past galas, were few and far between. Last year’s gala aligned with the Costume Institute’s Superfine show — black fashion — and had lots of gangsta looks. Surpisingly, many guests this year went for pure, timeless grace and elegance. It helps to draw from Greek sculpture, as did not only Kendall Jenner but also Lindsey Vonn, whose Thom Browne gown has faux marbling that evokes the art in the Met’s galleries. And Margot Robbie’s strapless gold-lamé gown, with hundreds of embroidered pieces, was sleek and chic, too. I assumed, having seen her play Tonya Harding, that Robbie was a bruiser, but she isn’t. Blake Lively, fresh from settling her defamation lawsuit, wore archival Versace with liquid construction and Venetian Rococo pink, coral, lilac, and peach like a sunset sky. At her hips are four three-dimensional bays evoking a Baroque church. Lively is a movie star and has 1950s glamour — Grace Kelly could have worn that dress — but so does Julianne Moore, at 65 looking sexy and sultry in a black, figure-hugging dress, with a mermaid train and a dropped shoulder strap à la Madame X. Her heavy diamond earrings and touch of feathering add sparkle.

In 1930, the British psychologist and cultural critic John Flügel first wrote about what he called the Great Male Renunciation starting in the 1770s, when men’s fashion, for centuries as colorful, ornate, and various as women’s, took its gradual and sharp turn toward basic black, gray, brown, and midnight blue. The best tailoring and materials never went out of style, but the look was egalitarian and functional. Men tossed their wigs in the trash. In 1770s New England, homespun was the rage, accented with brass and silver buckles and a bit of lace. Zoot suits and 1970s psychedelic style aside, it was forever thus until the last 20 or so years. Some of the men at the gala went bright and colorful. Ben Platt went for a pastel suit based, too literally, I think, on the Met’s big oil sketch for Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Most stuck with basic black, which has twists and turns. Connor Storrie, who stars in the TV gay drama Heated Rivalry, seemed at first to be glamorous but staid in a Saint Laurent–tailored black suit with a diamond broach, a long polka-dot scarf, and a polka-dot shirt, but he took off the suit jacket on the runway to show that it’s sleeveless and he’s got biceps the size of Mrs. Bezos’s bosom. He’s strapping, but the look is androgynous and Old Hollywood. I thought of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, two dynamite broads who go from simmer to boil. Patrick Schwarzenegger, Arnold’s son, stuck with black leather. His cropped leather jacket, satin trousers, corseted waist, cane, and black motorcyclist’s gloves looked very Victorian — Oscar Wilde meets Jack the Ripper. Bad Bunny delivered an entirely new look. The Puerto Rican singer aged himself by, he says, 50 years, with prosthetic makeup applied to his face, hands, and neck. He carried a cane and added to his basic black tux a black pussy bow from a 1940s gown designed by Charles James.

Some of the looks are less aesthetically pleasing and more ideological or polemical, such as Dunham’s. As a gentleman, I pause before I criticize a woman’s attire. Cardi B’s Mark Jacobs–designed dress seems to draw from surrealist doll paintings. The German painter Hans Bellmer depicted creepy dream dolls, the kind that rummage through the linen closet while you’re gone. Internet critics compare the large, bulbous shapes to bowels and brains. Why scare the farm animals? SZA wore a dress made from a hundred yards of vintage fabric sourced from eBay in a sustainability move. The singer said she was inspired by Wiener Werkstätte style and that it makes her and viewers feel happy. I’m not against happy unless is breaches the dam separating it from ditzy. Janelle Monáe’s gown combined 230 electrical wires, mechanical butterflies and dragonflies, live moss, ethernet cables, and 5,000 black crystals. She says the dress is about technology and nature sharing the same planet, but I have to add “awkwardly.”

I got a sneak preview of Costume Art yesterday. It’s very good and the most intellectually satisfying Costume Institute blockbuster I’ve seen in a long time. And it’s in prime Met real estate. The exhibition and this year’s gala premiere a new set of galleries for the Institute, 12,000 square feet, right off the Great Hall in what was for years the Met’s shop, which seemed as big as a department store. Now renovated, it’s very beautiful, up to the Met’s usual high standards.

All 17 Met departments collaborated on a fascinating show. As of Tuesday, and the Met’s still counting the money, the gala raised $42 million, barreling past last year’s record take by a third.