Met Gala 2026: The most striking red carpet looks
By Jacqui Palumbo, Oscar Holland, Bianca Betancourt, Jennifer Arnow, CNN│Photographs by Lanna Apisukh
New York (CNN) — Hundreds of stars ascended the steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Met Gala on Monday evening, bringing a range of interpretations to this year’s dress code, “Fashion is Art.”
Guests climbed the front steps against a verdant backdrop reminiscent of Monet, with the museum creating a garden-like setting of romantic hanging florals, barriers of green hedges, pots of lavender and a carpet resembling mossy bricks.
The theme mirrored an accompanying exhibition titled “Costume Art” at the Met’s Costume Institute, for which the gala is a major source of income. This year, the Met Gala raised a record $42 million, up from last year’s record of $31 million, the museum announced at a press conference before the event.
The night’s co-chairs included Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Venus Williams, Nicole Kidman and Beyoncé — who returned to the event after a decade-long hiatus in a glittering skeleton gown by Olivier Rousteing, bringing daughter Blue Ivy along for her Met Gala debut.
Organizers suggested that guests might “express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Stars looked to the canon of art history for inspiration, with early looks taking subtle cues from the theme, and more theatrical takes coming over the course of the evening.
This year brought unusual controversy due to the event’s primary sponsors, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with protests planned around New York City — and one protester attempting to breach the perimeter of the event before being stopped by police. Sánchez Bezos seemed to send a message through her own look for the night — a Schiaparelli gown riffing off of the John Singer Sargent portrait of Madame X, a depiction of a socialite that caused its own scandalous reception.
Some of the most dramatic looks of the night played with anatomy and the body, from Beyoncé’s show-stopping skeleton to Lisa’s Robert Wun-designed white veiled gown that framed her face with extra pairs of arms. Heidi Klum disguised herself as a living statue, and Bad Bunny was (nearly) unrecognizable by aging himself several decades.
“I always try to do something different,” the singer told Vogue on the red carpet, joking that it took “53 years” to create his look.
CNN’s Rachel Tashjian contributed to this report.
Stream CNN FlashDoc’s new documentary “Behind the Bob: Vogue’s Anna Wintour,” exploring Wintour’s decades-long reign, on the CNN app.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
