Anna Wintour arrives at 2026 Met Gala as fashion meets art
Anna Wintour's arrival put the Met Gala machine on display, with a 400-object Costume Art show, Beyoncé and Nicole Kidman as co-chairs, and a 6 p.m. red carpet.
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Anna Wintour's arrival at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday again centered the one figure who has turned the Met Gala into a national power index, where fashion, media, tech and celebrity converge on the museum steps. Guests began arriving around 5:30 p.m. ET, and red carpet coverage was set to begin at 6 p.m. ET, turning the entrance into the staging ground for an event that has become as much an institutional display as a party.
This year's gala was built around the Costume Institute's spring 2026 exhibition, Costume Art, which opens to the public on May 10 and runs through January 10, 2027. It is the first exhibition installed in the museum's nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries and will feature nearly 400 objects, pairing garments with works of art to examine fashion as an embodied art form and the centrality of the dressed body. The dress code, Fashion is Art, was designed to invite guests to show their relationship to fashion while keeping the museum's curatorial frame at the center of the night.
Wintour co-chaired the gala with Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams, underscoring how the Met has become a meeting point for entertainment, sports and luxury branding as much as for scholarship. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary chairs, while the host committee included Anthony Vaccarello, Zoë Kravitz, Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Gwendoline Christie, Alex Consani, Misty Copeland, Elizabeth Debicki, Lena Dunham, Paloma Elsesser, LISA, Chloe Malle, Sam Smith, Teyana Taylor, Lauren Wasser, Anna Weyant, A’ja Wilson, Yseult, Adut Akech, Angela Bassett, Sinéad Burke, Rebecca Hall, Aimee Mullins, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald and Chase Sui Wonders.
The Costume Institute says the gala's proceeds provide its primary source of annual funding, which is why the red carpet matters far beyond the flash of eveningwear. Last year's theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, was the first Met exhibition exclusively focused on Black designers and the first in more than 20 years centered on menswear, a reminder that the gala now functions as both spectacle and institutional showcase. With Costume Art, the museum extended that formula again, tying one of the city's most visible nights to the long arc of art history and the economics that sustain it.
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