The Met Gala 2026 takes place in New York on Monday, May 4, opening the Costume Institute's spring exhibition, Costume Art, and bringing roughly 450 A-list guests to the museum for an evening under the dress code "Fashion Is Art."
Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams serve as co-chairs for the event, which formally launches an exhibition that will display 400 outfits and objects spanning 5,000 years and remain on view through January 2027. The gala also lists Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos among its co-chairs and sponsors.
The red carpet livestream begins at 6:00 pm EDT / 3:00 pm PST and will be broadcast exclusively by Vogue across its digital platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. Ashley Graham, La La Anthony and Cara Delevingne will host the livestream, and Emma Chamberlain is reprising her role as Red Carpet Correspondent. Guests are expected to arrive at about 18:00 EST (23:00 BST).
Behind the chairs, the event’s host committee is headed up by Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz and includes a cross-section of entertainers and cultural figures: Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Teyana Taylor, Lisa from Blackpink, Elizabeth Debicki and Lena Dunham are listed as members of the committee. Anna Wintour — who has co-chaired the gala since 1995 — remains the long-running steward of the evening.
Those numbers matter because they show the scale of what the gala is meant to do in a single night: concentrate the museum’s months-long Costume Art exhibition into a public moment. Four hundred garments and objects drawn from five millennia will underpin an invitation that explicitly frames dress as an art practice — the dress code invites guests to explore their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.
Context helps: the Met Gala is held each year on the first Monday of May and exists to raise money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. This year’s theme, Costume Art, is named after the museum’s new exhibition and the show’s long run until January 2027 means the gala opens a season of public viewing well after the one-night spectacle ends.
The tension is built into that contrast. The exhibition spans 5,000 years of ceremonial, haute and everyday dress, while the gala compresses those histories into a single red carpet where a few hundred guests must decide how much to translate deep historical references into a wearable statement. The museum frames the choice: some stars may reference Baroque, Impressionist or Renaissance styles in their outfits, but only a small number of people will carry that conversation from the carpet into the galleries for the public to study over months.
How will tonight answer the question the headline raises — will this be an evening of genuine conversation between fashion and art, or a single flashy performance? The closes the loop: by design, the Met Gala is both. The exclusive livestream, hosted by recognizable faces and distributed by Vogue, will amplify the one-night performance to millions online, while the Costume Art exhibition — 400 pieces across 5,000 years on view until January 2027 — ensures the museum’s curatorial statement endures beyond tonight’s arrivals and headlines. In short, guests will perform the theme for a global audience, and the public will get the deeper lesson at the museum for the better part of a year.
