Everything to Know About the 2026 Met Gala: Theme, Hosts and More

Reported by Vogue.

Tonight, fashion's most theatrical night officially returns. The 2026 Met Gala takes place Monday, May 4 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art — and this year, the stakes feel higher than usual. According to Vogue, the 2025 event broke the gala's 77-year record, pulling in a staggering $31 million for the Met's Costume Institute. The bar has been set. Now comes the spectacle.

The exhibition anchoring this year's event is called "Costume Art," and it's as ambitious as the price of the tickets. The show will inaugurate the Met's new Condé M. Nast Galleries — nearly 12,000 square feet of new real estate — and draws from across the museum's entire collection to trace how the dressed (and undressed) body has been represented over 5,000 years of art history. Objects are organized around thematic body types: the Naked Body, the Classical Body, but also the Pregnant Body and the Aging Body — figures that art history has long sidelined. The dress code translates all of this into three words: Fashion Is Art. Interpret that however dangerously you like.

The Guest List Is Its Own Exhibition

The co-chair lineup alone could fill a stadium. Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour are leading the 2026 event, with Zoë Kravitz and Anthony Vaccarello co-chairing the host committee. That committee is dense with names — Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Paloma Elsesser, Misty Copeland, Aimee Mullins, A'ja Wilson, and more — a cross-section that feels genuinely intentional given the exhibition's focus on bodies in all their forms. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are serving as honorary chairs as lead sponsors of the gala and exhibition.

Once inside, guests follow a no-phone policy — meaning whatever happens at dinner, stays at dinner. The evening runs cocktails to dinner to a mystery performer, with time carved out to move through the exhibition itself. Décor has historically been its own event: last year, artist Cy Gavin erected a climbing tower of narcissus flowers at the entrance and projected his painting Untitled (Sky) onto the ceiling of the Temple of Dendur.

For those not on the 450-person guest list, the livestream airs exclusively on Vogue's digital platforms — YouTube, TikTok, and vogue.com — starting at 6:00 pm EDT. The red carpet will do what it always does: make the rest of us feel deeply underdressed and completely obsessed.

When fashion decides it's also fine art, the only real question is who shows up wearing the argument best.

Read the original at Vogue.