Met Gala Opens Costume Art Exhibit Amid Bezos Backlash and Protests

The event opened Costume Art, the Costume Institute’s new exhibition at The Met Fifth Avenue, which runs from May 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027. The show is the first to occupy the museum’s nearly 12,000-square-foot galleries next to the Great Hall, and the museum has framed it as an exploration of the “centrality of the dressed body,” pairing clothing with objects from across the collection to present fashion as an embodied art form. For the museum, the gala remains more than a red-carpet spectacle. The Met says it is the Costume Institute’s primary source of funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations.

That structure makes the backlash around Bezos impossible to separate from the institution’s own economics. Anna Wintour defended Lauren Sánchez Bezos in a CNN interview, calling her “a great lover of costume and, obviously, of fashion” and saying the couple’s generosity was appreciated. But the protests and subway ads underscored how the gala has become a national stage for questions about who gets to underwrite culture, whose tastes set the terms of access and how a public museum balances art-world prestige with billionaire influence.

Inside the party, the open-ended “Fashion Is Art” dress code produced exactly the kind of improvisation that has made the Met Gala a cultural census of the upper end of celebrity life. Beyoncé, Blue Ivy and Jay-Z arrived after the cocktail hour was already winding down, while Stevie Nicks made a surprise appearance, adding legacy music stardom to a guest list that also reflected fashion’s close ties to tech wealth and old-line entertainment. The resulting mix was less a single aesthetic than a demonstration of how the gala functions as a convergence point for industries that shape American attention.