Is Fashion Art? What the Met Gala Asks Us to Consider
"Wow, Lea, did you see what Kylie Jenner wore at the Met Gala? I didn’t really like her dress."
Every year, my friends and I are glued to our phones, following the Met Gala. We want to know what the celebrities are wearing, who got invited and which luxury brands the stars are working with. Our curiosity peaks as we look at the jewelry, the watches, the gowns and all the small details that shape how we think about beauty and art.
Most of my friends can tell me who wore what, but few can tell me what the night is actually for. I wanted to understand why a party most of us will never attend has become one of the biggest cultural events of the year.
What is the Met Gala?
The Met Gala takes place on the first Monday in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is a fundraiser for the museum’s Costume Institute, and it also celebrates the opening of the department’s major spring exhibition. Each year has a theme, and guests are directed to dress to it.
The event was established in 1948 by publicist Eleanor Lambert, who saw it as a calculated way to raise money for the Costume Institute. In the 1970s, under Diana Vreeland, it became more theatrical, with elaborate decorations and immersive settings that blurred the line between fashion and art.
The most recognizable name behind the gala is Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor-in-chief, who has led the event for decades. She helps shape the guest list, sets the tone and enforces the rules. While Wintour manages the event, Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton shapes the theme and meaning behind each year’s fashion exhibition.
Tickets to the event reportedly cost $100,000 each, and tables run about $350,000. Money alone does not get you in, though. Fashion houses and companies typically buy tables and fill them with celebrities, designers and artists, and the final list is closely guarded. In 2026, around 400 guests attended, including Beyoncé, Stevie Nicks, Bad Bunny, Sabrina Carpenter, Anne Hathaway and Naomi Osaka.
For one day a year, it feels like the Met Gala is everywhere. Open any social media app on the first Monday in May and it is there: photos, videos, rankings, reactions and jokes. Fashion magazines, designers, influencers and people who have never cared about fashion are all talking about the same thing at the same time. I think there are three reasons it seizes control of the pop culture conversation for a day. The first is the theme. Every guest has the same assignment, so every outfit becomes an interpretation of the theme. That makes it easy to compare, rank and debate about each look, discourse that social media loves to obsess over. The theme also reaches far beyond the red carpet. Fashion lovers follow it closely, and some dress up themselves in their fanciest outfits, built around the year’s theme, as if they were on the guest list too. Even people watching from home play along.
Secondly, the gala puts musicians, actors, athletes and artists on the same staircase, and fans follow their favorites look by look. This year, people were talking about Beyoncé’s return after a decade away, and about Rihanna’s fashionably late entrance. The excitement is not only online. On Met Gala day, the area around the museum feels like its own event. Press, photographers and journalists gather for hours. Fans wait near the hotels where the stars get ready, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone famous in their Gala gown. The third is exclusion. Phones and photography inside the gala have been banned since 2015, by order of Anna Wintour. The rest of us only see the carpet, and the few candid photos that escape from on the inside become stories of their own. The less we see, the more we want to see.
The same things that make the gala exciting make it easy to criticize. It is a display of wealth in a public museum, and the guest list can feel closed off from the people the museum is meant to serve.
This year gave critics fresh material. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary chairs and reportedly contributed at least $10 million to the evening, and their involvement drew protests in the lead-up to the event. Inside, actor Sarah Paulson walked the carpet with a dollar bill covering her eyes, a nod to the “1%.”
In 2026, the exhibition the gala was centered around asked the question “is fashion art?”. The exhibit, titled “Costume Art,” and curated by Bolton, pairs garments from the Costume Institute with sculptures, paintings and objects from across the museum’s collection. It is organized around the dressed body and how it has been represented across time and space. A dress beside a statue invites us to look at both more carefully.
The dress code for the gala, "Fashion Is Art," turned that idea into an assignment. Beyoncé wore a diamond and silver-encrusted gown by Olivier Rousteing. Naomi Osaka’s "human anatomy" outfit was one of the most talked-about looks of the evening. Many guests arrived in pieces that were closer to sculpture than clothing.
I think the museum made a strong case. Fashion has often been treated as a less serious artform than painting or sculpture, even though it takes similar skill, history and imagination. Putting it in the same room as the rest of the collection is declaring that fashion belongs there. The show also opened the museum’s new galleries near the Great Hall, a nearly 12,000-square-foot space dedicated primarily to the Costume Institute’s annual exhibitions. Fashion now has a permanent, prominent home inside the museum.
And unlike the gala, the exhibition is open to everyone. Costume Art opened to the public on May 10 and runs through January 10, 2027, so there is still time to see it for yourself.
Money, and a lot of it. The 2026 gala raised a record $42 million, up from $31 million in 2025. The Costume Institute is the only department at the Met required to fund itself entirely, so those proceeds pay for exhibitions, acquisitions, conservation and operations. The department holds about 33,000 objects, and without the gala much of that collection would stay in storage, unseen.
That is the part of the night most viewers miss. The glamour and excess of the gala is how a department that must pay its own bills keeps its work in front of the public.
A few things surprised me the most about the gala. The gala is a working fundraiser first and a fashion show second. The no-phones rule means the most famous party in fashion is largely unphotographed from the inside. The guests are famous in part because the event needs publicity to justify a $100,000 ticket.
This conversation is not really about whether a gown belongs in a museum. It is about who gets to decide what counts as art, and who gets to pay for it. The Met Gala does not answer either question perfectly. Yet it brings attention and money to a form of art that has often been overlooked, and it makes us look differently at what we wear.
Photo Caption: Anna Wintour, Lead Chairperson of the Met Gala
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
