The Met Gala is a few days away. The dress code? Fashion Is Art. And if history is any indication, a handful of people will take it seriously and everyone else will be talking about their looks for the next decade.
THE MET GALA 2026
This year‘s Met Gala comes with a theme that is, for once, impossible to get wrong, and very easy to get right. The Costume Institute’s 2026 exhibition, Costume Art, examines the centrality of the dressed body, juxtaposing garments with works of art from across the museum’s collection to illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body.
The dress code, Fashion Is Art, invites guests to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form. It’s an open-ended brief that welcomes essentially any interpretation. Five thousand years of the dressed human body as artistic subject, paintings, sculptures, and historical dresses presented side by side. Before Monday’s carpet rolls out, here are the 22 looks that set the standard for what showing up to the Met actually means.
