The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday announced the dress code for the 2026 Met Gala, and it’s just as abstract as you might expect.
Guests invited to the event — a starry benefit for the museum’s fashion-focused Costume Institute — will be given the attire guideline “fashion is art.” The guidance, which doubles as a declaration of fashion’s permanent place at the Met, leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
According to the museum, the dress code invites guests “to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and celebrate the countless depictions of the dressed body throughout art history.”
For years, the Met Gala fund-raiser event, traditionally held on the first Monday in May, has functioned as a curtain-raiser of sorts for the museum’s highly anticipated spring fashion exhibition. This year’s show, titled “Costume Art,” opens on May 10 and will pair almost 200 artworks from the Met’s collection with approximately 200 historical and contemporary garments and accessories from the Costume Institute.
The exhibition will inaugurate the new Condé M. Nast Galleries, the new and nearly 11,500-square-foot permanent galleries for the Costume Institute at the Met, which were named after the founder of the media giant Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker and GQ, among other titles.
“I wanted to focus on the centrality of the dressed body within the museum, connecting artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s professorial curator in charge, said in a statement. “Rather than prioritizing fashion’s visuality, which often comes at the expense of the corporeal, ‘Costume Art’ privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.”
Similar to previous Met Gala dress codes, “fashion is art” is rather abstract. Unlike “black tie,” “garden party” or other more traditional dress codes, the Met’s guidelines are meant to be thematically resonant with the exhibition. Here, the guidance seems intended to encourage guests to examine the various ways designers think of the body as the foundation for their vision.
Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour will serve as co-chairs for the gala. On Monday, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos were announced as the gala’s honorary chairs; the couple are also the lead sponsors of the fund-raiser and the exhibition.
The gala’s host committee, co-chaired by Zoë Kravitz and Anthony Vaccarello, will include celebrities and notable figures like Sabrina Carpenter, Gwendoline Christie, Adut Akech, Angela Bassett, Amy Sherald and A’ja Wilson.
Gina Cherelus covers dating, relationships and culture for The Times and writes the weekly dating column Third Wheel.
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