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.”








