25 Exclusive Polaroid Photos From the 2026 Met Gala
After the party, there’s the after-party
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
The Met Gala's red carpet gets all the attention, but the real document of the night has always been what happens in the margins — the candid, the unguarded, the actually human. According to Harper's Bazaar, this year's 2026 gala was captured in a series of exclusive Polaroid portraits, and the resulting images read less like celebrity coverage and more like a genuine social record of fashion's biggest evening.
The guest list alone tells a story about where culture is sitting right now. Naomi Osaka, Tate McRae, and Maude Apatow share the same frame (figuratively) as industry veterans Naomi Watts, Miranda Kerr, and Sarah Paulson — a generational cross-section that the gala, at its best, has always been uniquely positioned to deliver. Irina Shayk and Karlie Kloss remind you that the supermodel is not, in fact, dead. Paloma Elsesser showing up in Polaroid form feels like exactly the kind of archival permanence her presence in fashion deserves.
The Creatives in the Room
What makes this particular set of images compelling isn't just who attended — it's who stood next to whom. Alessandro Michele and Coleman Domingo photographed together is a full sentence about the overlap between fashion and Hollywood right now. Connor Ives and Louisa Jacobson signal the rising-designer-meets-rising-actress energy that the industry is clearly betting on. Alexa Chung and Laura Harrier in the same Polaroid is, frankly, a mood board in human form. Even the presence of Jordan Roth — Broadway producer, committed maximalist — underscores that the gala's guest list has never been purely about fashion, even when it pretends to be.
The Polaroid format itself is doing something intentional here. In an era of hyper-produced red carpet content, instant film strips away the retouching, the ring lights, the algorithm-ready angles. What you get instead is texture, grain, and something closer to truth. Dree Hemingway appearing twice — solo and alongside Grace Gummer — feels less like a PR moment and more like a snapshot from someone's actual night. That's the point. The Polaroid doesn't perform. It just records.
Fashion months and runway seasons are carefully controlled narratives, but the Met Gala, for all its orchestration, still produces moments that slip through the machinery — and this year, those moments were worth preserving in analog.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
