The 2026 Met Gala: Bezoses, Beyoncé, and Blood
When a blockbuster exhibition of the work of John Singer Sargent opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year, one painting was the clear standout. You could see it glowing like a lighthouse from several rooms away: Sargent’s “Madame X,” from 1884, a large-scale portrait of the twenty-five-year-old socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, which caused an uproar when Sargent displayed it at the Paris Salon. Gautreau was an American arriviste living in Paris, who at the time was considered one of the city’s great beauties and most capable social climbers; she’d married a shipping magnate twenty-one years her senior and then deftly launched herself into the Parisian party circuit, where she quickly amassed influence for both her high-spirited disposition and her exaggerated looks (including a prominent aquiline nose, a penchant for heavy maquillage, and a preference for dresses that nipped her in tightly at the waist and accentuated her pale décolletage). Sargent, in an attempt to capture his muse’s appetite for audacity, painted her in a form-fitting black gown, with one strap drooping seductively off her shoulders. Viewers at the Salon were aghast; they cursed the painting as a crime against good taste. La Gautreau, they griped, looked sickly, snooty, and vulgar. Sargent attempted to course-correct by painting the errant strap back onto Gautreau’s shoulder, but it was too late. Sargent escaped the scandal by decamping from Paris to London, and Gautreau retreated from the haut monde. By some accounts, she removed all the mirrors from her home so that she wouldn’t have to look at her own face. She died in 1915, at just fifty-six years old.
I found it interesting, to say the least, that for Monday night’s Met Gala Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who is herself fifty-six, and newly married to the fourth-richest man on earth, wore a dress directly inspired by “Madame X”—skin-tight, low-cut Schiaparelli, with one bejewelled strap dangling. In a certain way, the homage made good sense. Sánchez Bezos, who was, along with her husband, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, an “honorary chair” of the gala (a polite way of saying that they paid for it; reports put their contribution at around ten million dollars), has much in common with La Gautreau, from the energy she puts into aristocratic ambition to her obsession with a cartoonishly snatched waistline. Where the two women diverge, however, is in their apparent tolerance for public outrage. Gautreau withdrew when the masses turned on her. Sánchez Bezos, by contrast, does not seem the least bit fazed by a hostile public glare. She has spent recent years flaunting her and her husband’s wealth—with a five-hundred-million-dollar yacht, a fleet of private planes, a bottomless trove of designer clothing and blingy jewelry, an ability to seemingly rent out the entire city of Venice for their nuptials—even when it feels extremely discordant with popular sentiment. This past January, as rumors of Bezos’s plan to gut the Washington Post’s staff circulated, Sánchez Bezos was spotted at Paris Fashion Week in a Dior coat with a fur collar as big as a boa constrictor.
The Bezoses’ involvement in the gala has prompted a stream of public protests in recent weeks. One activist group scattered hundreds of bottles of fake urine throughout the museum, a reference to reports that some Amazon drivers have been forced to pee in water bottles rather than take bathroom breaks. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he would be declining his invitation, and yesterday morning his office, in collaboration with the fashion magazine i-D, released a photo portfolio featuring tailors, a retail worker, and former Amazon employees, as a kind of pointed counter-celebration. This is not the first time the gala has had a controversial honorary chair (see: Julia Koch, the wife of the late right-wing billionaire David Koch) or even the first time that Jeff Bezos has been a sponsor (see: 2012). But the Bezoses’ involvement this year exacerbates a sense that tech oligarchs, having already purchased political power by cozying up to President Donald Trump, are now buying their way into soft power, too. As my colleague Kyle Chayka recently reported, Silicon Valley types have become newly enamored with the idea of taste, considering personal aesthetics to be a precious resource in a world increasingly dominated by A.I. The Met Gala is a shortcut into the inner sanctum of the culture industry; for what amounts to most Silicon Valley moguls’ pocket cash, they can rub elbows with Beyoncé.
None of these tensions made their way beyond the barricades on Monday night. If anything, the mood of this year’s gala was remarkably serene, even sedate, perhaps because the event’s capacious dressing assignment—“Fashion Is Art”—was a softball compared with other recent Met Gala themes. Sánchez Bezos was one of many guests whose looks made explicit reference to art history, creating a disorienting sense of an art museum sprung to life. Madonna arrived in a Saint Laurent ensemble featuring a long, witchy black gown and a headpiece that resembled a ghostly pirate ship, an homage to the painting “The Temptation of St. Anthony. Fragment II,” by Leonora Carrington. (Like the woman depicted in that work, Madonna also carried an antique hunting horn and brought a coven of female attendants to carry her long cape.) The “One Battle After Another” actress Chase Infiniti wore a colorful, almost psychedelic Thom Browne dress loosely inspired by the Venus de Milo. The pop singer Gracie Abrams made reference to Gustav Klimt in a gilded Chanel gown that was encrusted with chunky jewels in the manner of a Byzantine crown. Jon Batiste looked like marshmallow fluff in a puffy ivory ERL getup that channelled a Barkley L. Hendricks painting, and Angela Bassett, in a flirty flamingo-hued Prabal Gurung corset gown with long, sparkly fringe, looked like she’d stepped out of Laura Wheeler Waring’s “Girl in Pink Dress.” Colman Domingo’s long Valentino tunic bore a harlequin print that nodded to Pablo Picasso’s “Acrobat and Young Harlequin,” and Anne Hathaway’s swingy Michael Kors dress (made in collaboration with the painter Peter McGough) was decorated with motifs recalling Grecian urns. Charli XCX’s black Saint Laurent gown, adorned with delicate irises reminiscent of a Van Gogh still-life, was actually a meta reference to the designer’s spring-summer haute-couture collection from 1988, which also included Van Gogh’s irises. Cardi B paid her respects to the German surrealist Hans Bellmer with a Marc Jacobs gown whose lumpen padding, held in by a tight lace casing, called to mind a chic intestinal tract. Zac Posen’s GapStudio look for Kendall Jenner featured white jersey-T-shirt material twisted to evoke the Hellenistic sculpture “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” plus a pair of gargantuan wings. Lena Dunham, back on the gala carpet after many years away, wore a cherry-red feather-and-sequin Valentino look by Alessandro Michele which nodded subtly to Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”; she was neither Judith nor Holofernes, she explained, but “the blood spatter as Judith cuts the neck off a man.” The art-freakiest look, though, belonged to Heidi Klum, who wore a head-to-toe foam-and-latex covering that turned her into a walking replica of Raffaelle Monti’s 1847 sculpture “The Veiled Vestal.” It may have been more Spirit Halloween than sophisticated, but it gave me a good laugh.
If that crowd formed an art ensemble, another group of attendees made up an anatomical one, drawing inspiration from the theme of this year’s corporeal-minded Costume Institute exhibition, which invites viewers to consider the “centrality of the dressed body.” I struggled to be wowed by the procession of outfits featuring diaphanous fabric artfully draped across an otherwise naked torso, but there were some standouts among the group. Sabine Getty wore a horror-inspired Ashi Studio dress that gave her the appearance of being grabbed, on her right nipple, by a disembodied hand. Breasts were a theme in general, starting with Sánchez Bezos’s gravity-defying “Madame X” cleavage and continuing at a steady pace. Kylie Jenner wore a Schiaparelli corset dress that was built, complete with fake nipples, to look as if it had fallen down to accidentally expose her bare chest. Not to be outdone by her younger half sister, Kim Kardashian arrived wearing a custom fibreglass breastplate designed by the British artist Allen Jones, with even bigger faux nipples on display. Janelle Monáe, who can always be counted on to push a theme to its maximalist edge, showed up in an undulating Christian Siriano gown that looked like computer wires pushing through a rainforest floor, with various bits of metal flotsam covering her breasts (a subtle commentary, perhaps, on the gala’s tech invasion). Both the Thai pop star Lisa and the theatre producer Jordan Roth wore looks made by the avant-garde Hong Kong designer Robert Wun, who re-created parts of their bodies using a 3-D printer; Lisa came wearing a headdress made out of carbon copies of her own arms, while Roth sported a replica of his entire upper half peering over his shoulder. Bad Bunny paired a fairly tame Zara tuxedo with a curly gray wig and facial prosthetics, designed by the makeup artist Mike Marino, to artificially age the singer by about five decades. (The effect, presumably inspired by a section of the Costume Institute exhibition devoted to “the aging body,” lost points for repeating a technique used several years ago, by another pop artist, the Weeknd, for the cover of his album “Dawn FM.”) Beyoncé, one of the event’s co-chairs, and attending the gala for the first time in a decade, arrived late with Jay-Z and her daughter Blue Ivy in tow, wearing an Olivier Rousteing garment designed to look like a jewel-encrusted skeleton, which was clearly a nod to the body theme, but which reminded me more than anything of the Frida Kahlo painting “The Dream”—leave it to the reigning queen of the night to synthesize both prompts into a single look.
Some outfits seemed to embrace the idea that “Fashion Is Art” can really mean anything. Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, the breakout stars of “Heated Rivalry,” made their Met Gala débuts in a polka-dot Saint Laurent halter top and a Balenciaga matador outfit, respectively. Sarah Pigeon, the star of “American Love Story,” wore a minimalist Loewe dress in lemon-lime satin; it was, in its simplicity, a hat tip to her role as Carolyn Bessette, though a welcome departure from the character’s palette of black and beige. The Olympic skier Eileen Gu arrived in an Iris van Herpen minidress covered with clear glass beads that resembled tiny bubbles; a mechanism hidden under her dress created real bubbles, which floated out through an opening in her skirt, bringing to mind Glinda the Good Witch. Nicole Kidman, another co-chair, wore a slinky red Chanel gown with marabou cuffs, and looked great, because, well, she always looks great. Sabrina Carpenter, who later performed inside the gala, turned up in a flapperish dress by Dior, made out of negatives from the classic film “Sabrina.” It was more Hollywood than fine art, but, sure, why not? Also in the “why not” category: Stevie Nicks, attending her first Met Gala, wore custom John Galliano for Zara, a kooky Victorian look complete with a bustle and a tall top hat. It would have been more suited to last year’s dandy theme, but better late than never. The French model and singer Yseult—whose body formed the basis of one of several new mannequins in the Costume Institute exhibition—looked like a chic bug in a Harris Reed demi-couture design, which featured a golden bodice the color of a scarab shell and long antennae sprouting from an eyepiece. And, speaking of eyepieces, the actress Sarah Paulson wore a poofy gray Matières Fécales ball gown accessorized with a blindfold made out of a dollar bill—meant, I later learned, to represent the blithe privilege of the one per cent. It may have been the only overtly political statement of the night, and, like most overtly political statements at the Met Gala, it felt like trying to have your roses and eat your bread, too. ♦
