Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé and Rihanna lead Met Gala 2026 red carpet glamour

Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé and Rihanna were among the biggest names driving the Met Gala red carpet, where celebrity presence once again did more than sell glamour. It turned New York’s most-watched fashion night into a public display of status, taste and influence, with the 2026 benefit serving as the opening-night stage for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Art exhibition.

The gala took place on Monday, May 4, 2026, and the livestream began at 5:30 pm EDT. The Met set the dress code as Fashion Is Art, tying the carpet directly to an exhibition focused on fashion as an art form and on the dressed body across art history. That framing made the event less like a celebrity parade than a cultural argument: clothing was presented as an object of museum-level significance, and the red carpet became the first place that argument was made visible to the public.

The exhibition itself is the first installed in the museum’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot space off the Great Hall at The Met Fifth Avenue. Costume Art includes nearly 400 objects, about 200 garments and accessories and about 200 paintings, sculptures and decorative arts. That scale matters. It places runway craft, archival dress and fine art in the same institutional frame, showing how fashion moves between commerce and culture, and how luxury houses use moments like the Met Gala to shape the conversation around identity, aspiration and trend-setting.

The Met Gala has long been the Costume Institute’s primary source of funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and operations, and the 2026 event continued that role. Held annually on the first Monday in May, it remains the public-facing launch of the institute’s spring exhibition, a one-night spectacle that underwrites year-round museum work. In that sense, the carpet does more than reward the famous. It helps finance the scholarship, collecting and staging behind the exhibition inside the museum.

For all the spectacle on the steps, the night’s deeper message was clear: the Met Gala now functions as a high-profile engine of cultural signaling. Stars such as Sabrina Carpenter, Beyoncé and Rihanna brought the attention, but the institution used that attention to reinforce fashion’s place in the museum, and the museum’s place at the center of fashion’s power.