The Met Gala 2026 theme announced

The Met Gala’s 2026 theme has officially been revealed.

The theme for the 2026 Met Gala and concurrent spring 2026 museum exhibition is “Costume Art,” a theme that aims to “celebrate fashion as an art form,” according to a joint Instagram post from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Met Costume Institute.

“Focusing primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present, Costume Art will be organized into a series of thematic body types that reflect their ubiquity and endurance through time and space,” the Met stated in a press release about the exhibition. “These comparisons will highlight the inextricable relationship between clothing and the body and reveal that artistic representations of the body are shaped by the garments that clothe them and that the garments, in turn, are shaped by the bodies which they clothe.”

The Met Gala, also called the Costume Institute Benefit, is held annually in support of the Costume Institute exhibition, and serves as the primary funding source for the institute’s various activities and operations. The benefit is organized by Vogue and has been chaired or co-chaired by Vogue‘s Global Editorial Director Anna Wintour — previously Vogue‘s longtime editor-in-chief — since 1995.

The dress code for the Met Gala is generally announced a few months after the theme announcement, meaning the 2026 dress code has not yet been revealed.

Met curator Andrew Bolton told Vogue on Monday that the exhibition theme is inspired by “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” so it’s possible we’ll see a dress code that follows suit.

The Met Gala is traditionally held the first Monday in May. 

The co-chairs for the 2026 Met Gala have yet to be announced.

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