The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has announced the dress code for this year’s Met Gala: “Fashion is Art.”
The museum announced the dress code Monday, along with this year’s celebrity committee and co-chairs.
According to an announcement in Vogue, the directive is meant to reflect the ethos of “Costume Art,” which explores the “centrality of the dressed body” through depictions and interpretations of the human form in the Met’s extensive collection.
The dress code encourages guests to think about how designers can use their bodies as a blank canvas.
“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, said in a statement. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was.”
The co-chairs for the 202 Met Gala, as previously announced, include Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, and members of the Gala Host Committee, co-chaired by Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz. Some members of the committee include Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Teyana Taylor and Lena Dunham.
On Monday, Vogue announced the new members joining the host committee, including Chase Sui Wonders, Angela Bassett, Rebecca Hall and Aimee Mullins.
Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos are slo serving as co-chairs of the event, which was announced in November.
They, and everyone else attending, will be figuring out what to wear come May 4. The code seems to have been chosen for maximum flexibility. “Hopefully, it will put an end to the rather obsolete ‘Is Fashion Art?’ debate once and for all,” Bolton quip.
As fashion-lovers know, the gala is not only a fundraiser for the institute — a self-funding department — but a launchpad for the annual spring fashion exhibit. Curated by Bolton and his team, this year’s show, “Costume Art,” seeks to present fashion as a through-line in the entire history of art.
The exhibit will be the biggest, in terms of objects, that the institute’s ever done: nearly 400 in total, or 200 garments and 200 artworks from around the museum, placed in pairs. “It’s a beast,” Bolton said.
The idea, he noted, is to examine “the dressed body” in all its aspects, and to make the point that not only is fashion art — something previous shows have shown — but that art is fashion. “It’s reversing what we’ve done before,” Bolton explained. “Now we’re looking at art through the lens of fashion.”
He also called the Spring 2026 “Costumed Art” exhibition, set to open to the public on May 10 at the Met, one of the highlights of his career.
“We’re trying to make a statement here — that this is something WE can do at the Met,” he explained. “We have access to 16 curatorial departments across the museum.” And, of course, access to the institute’s more than 33,000 garments. “Really, nobody else has this capacity,” Bolton says.
Additional reporting by AP
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