Met Gala 2026, Costume Art exhibition opens at The Met

The Met Gala returned to its core purpose on Monday, May 4: raising the money that keeps The Costume Institute alive, while using fashion to argue for its place beside painting, sculpture and the rest of the museum’s canon. This year’s theme, described as “Fashion Is Art,” surrounded the opening of Costume Art, the spring exhibition that will run at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027.

The museum says the exhibition is built around the dressed body, pairing garments with works from across the collection to show how clothing, the body and art have always been intertwined. That framing matters because it moves the gala beyond celebrity spectacle and into a larger fight over cultural authority: whether couture is commerce, costume or fine art, and who gets to make that call. The show will also inaugurate nearly 12,000 square feet of new galleries adjacent to the Great Hall, making the 2026 gala a launch for a major expansion of the museum’s fashion footprint.

The evening carried the weight of a funding model that has defined The Costume Institute for decades. The annual Costume Institute Benefit remains the department’s primary source of money for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations, a reminder that the glitter of the red carpet bankrolls the work behind the scenes. The institute’s history stretches back to 1937, when it began as the Museum of Costume Art, before merging with The Met in 1946 and becoming a curatorial department in 1959.

That institutional history helps explain why the gala still matters far beyond fashion coverage. The Costume Institute now holds more than 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries, and Costume Art will be the first exhibition to occupy the new gallery space built around that collection. The museum also said the gala livestream began at 5:30 p.m. EDT, while The Met Fifth Avenue closed for the event, clearing the building for one night of fundraising that now helps define the museum’s public identity.

For The Met, the message was clear: fashion is no longer being treated as an accessory to art. It is being used to test the boundaries of the museum itself.