They call it “fashion’s biggest night of the year,” but Monday night’s Met Gala is being described in far less flattering ways, including “billionaire circus” and “influencers, not icons.”
This year the gala is co-chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour. The host committee features a number of celebrities including Zoë Kravitz and Yves Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello. Most notably and most controversially, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are honorary co-chairs as well as lead sponsors, dropping a reported $10 million on the event.
The Met Gala has for some time been criticized for being overcommercialized, gauche — and now, hollow.
Long out of step with an American public that faces a growing affordability crisis and more, the Met Gala has for some time been criticized for being overcommercialized, gauche — and now, hollow. In 2026, the Met Gala has become a symbol of American culture: gutted of meaning, pandering to the billionaire class, publicity for the sake of publicity.
This year the dress code is “Fashion is Art,” in step with the gala’s celebration of “costume art.” Andrew Bolton, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, told Vogue, “What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body. It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was.” This theme, counterintuitively, speaks to the very best of what the Met Gala can offer: a reminder of the virtuosity and cultural importance of fashion.
For decades, the Met Gala has ballooned into a high-profile spectacle, a central fixture not just in the fashion world, but in the American lexicon. It now appears that that cultural cachet has started to erode. And this year it feels as though it has truly diminished.
The Met Gala is a tangible example of how American culture is trapped in a multisided game of tug-of-war between who controls and who drives culture. Is it influencers? Celebrities? Legislation out of Washington? The billionaire class? An unholy combination? Or do we have no meaningful overarching culture at all? Anna Wintour, it seems, doesn’t have an answer any more than I do.
The first event was held in October 1948, the creation of storied fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, to fund the Met’s fledgling Costume Institute. The Met Gala would not become the Met Gala as we know it as until the early 1970s, when former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland joined the Costume Institute. Under Vreeland, celebrity and extravagance became twin pillars of the event. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, for example, served as co-chair of Vreeland’s Met Gala in 1976 and 1977. The themes were more interpretive: “Untailored Garments” and “The Glory of Russian Costume,” for example, drove attendees to dress more creatively and with inspiration, and to move away from “black-tie gala.”
In the last few years, the gala has been met with protests and justifiable outrage for what many say is a display of wealth that rings dystopian when so many have so little, and in the face of war threatening the globe. Many have likened the Met Gala to the Capitol at the center of the hugely popular book series “The Hunger Games.” Remember Haley Kalil, a TikToker who goes by HaleyyBaylee, who unironically posted a stylized video of herself wearing her floral Met Gala gown over audio of “let them eat cake” before she hosted for E on the carpet in 2024? (The backlash especially highlighted the escalating violence in Gaza at the time.)
The commentary has written itself over the past few years and now, with the Bezoses at the helm of the gala, it is almost too obvious. The Met Gala has become all but a caricature of itself. New York City is covered with posters that read “Boycott the Bezos Met Ball.” Hundreds of miniature water bottles filled with yellow liquid have been placed around the Met Museum, calling attention to allegations of Amazon’s poor working conditions as delivery drivers have been denied bathroom breaks and allegedly have had to urinate in plastic bottles and defecate into bags inside their trucks. Signs bearing the Amazon logo above a basket of empty plastic bottles have been installed on lampposts. “Met Gala VIP toilet installed in honor of Met Gala chair Jeff Bezos,” the sign reads. “Go ahead, it’s good enough for his staff.”
Zendaya and Meryl Streep, two once-in-a-generation talents, are among the biggest celebrity names who declined to attend this year. Among the fashion elites, Lauren Santo Domingo, the co-founder of the luxury online retailer Moda Operandi and a longtime Vogue editor, is also said to be skipping the event. All three have provided viable reasons, but the internet has surmised that it is political and it is because of the billionaire hosts — notably, something that is unconfirmed. But many have run with this narrative nonetheless.
While Bezos’ incomprehensible wealth can certainly buy his new bride access to the fashion world, credibility takes time and effort. Or that used to be the case. Sánchez has ingratiated herself in the notoriously fortified upper echelon of fashion: the cover of Vogue, a wedding gown personally blessed by Wintour, Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach on the payroll, front row in Paris for couture week and now honorary co-chair and primary sponsor at the Met Gala.
While Bezos’ incomprehensible wealth can certainly buy his new bride access to the fashion world, credibility takes time and effort.
It’s true that this is how things generally work. Wealth engenders status, and then status affords access. But there used to be a level of opportunity for the rest of us: the possibility of buying a home, good quality public education, an employer that responded to good work, artists who could afford to live in cities, creativity fueled by imagination and not money, books written by the human mind, clothing that lasted years. This isn’t naivete or an inability to see this country for the woefully imperfect place it has been for generations. I understand all of that — and still see how brutally hard it is to be an American right now: financially, politically, creatively.
When you consider this, the dress code starts to feel ironic. “Fashion is Art” asks guests and those watching the red carpet at home to consider fashion as an intellectual pursuit, as art, as culturally central, as enduring. The exhibition features some 400 objects and spans 5,000 years: a reminder that the Zara maxi skirt sitting in a landfill from a single wear last summer is not what fashion makes.
When being “chic,” a word co-opted by the internet to antithetically mean “trendy,” actually just means driving excessive and dangerously wasteful spending and flat, monolithic fashion, how can fashion be art at all? It cannot.
It is foolish to deny the power of big-time TikTok stars and the influence of niche creators, but it is also disingenuous to deny that their presence at marquee events and, say, at White House press briefings tends to feel delegitimate. Democratization is crucial and good in so many well-documented ways, but when credibility hasn’t been earned, whether you’re a billionaire’s wife or on the content treadmill, so much gets lost and culture everywhere suffers.
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