Fashion Is Art: Unpacking This Year's Met Gala Dress Code

Every year, the first Monday in May arrives with two things: the biggest red carpet in fashion, aka the Met Gala, and a theme that sends the internet into interpretive meltdown. This time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the 2026 Met Gala dress code as “Fashion Is Art,” orbiting a larger exhibition theme titled “Costume Art.” If that sounds vague to you, you’re not alone; this is one of the more abstract themes in the history of the Gala.

But here’s the context: This year marks a major milestone for the Costume Institute for which the Gala is held. The Institute will move into a permanent 12,000-square-foot home in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, positioned beside the Met’s Great Hall, where it will stage its annual spring exhibition alongside shows from other curatorial departments.

aerial image of the first Met Gala in 1948Pinterest

To get why that matters you have to go back to what the Gala actually was before it became the global spectacle it is now. When the event began in 1948 it was a straightforward fundraiser for the newly integrated Costume Institute, which had only just been absorbed into the Met a couple of years earlier. In those early decades, the Costume Institute’s work was treated as a sideshow at best. Textile objects were fragile, difficult to preserve, and seen as something tied to commerce or personal vanity than as mediums of intellectual expression. In a museum ecosystem dominated by painting, sculpture, and antiquities, dress was not seen as artistic enough to claim a seat at the table alongside canonical art forms. 

The Gala, through its exhibitions and its red carpet’s global visibility, has chipped away at that dismissal by aligning clothing with mainstream cultural institutions (read celebrity culture). Which makes this a big moment for both the costume institute and fashion as a whole. Hence, the “Fashion is art” theme to celebrate this milestone.

And where does the theme “Costume Art” enter the frame? That is the theme of the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition. To mark the momentous occasion, Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, has conceived an exhibition that directly addresses the art-fashion divide. “Fashion’s acceptance as an art form has really occurred on art’s terms,” the curator has explained in an interview. “It’s premised on the negation, on the renunciation, of the body.” By the Costume Art exhibition, Bolton attempts to make fashion focuses on the bodies that the clothes have dressed throughout history.

A look from the upcoming spring exhibit at the Costume InstituteBFA

With that in mind, the dress code “Fashion Is Art” gives every guest a creative prompt on how to align their outfit with the central theme of the day. The Gala “encourages attendees to consider the many ways that designers use the body as their blank canvas” and make a case for fashion as a legitimate art form. So think outfits that are inspired by anatomy and the human body, lot's of art references and a very avant garde red carpet.

The Met Gala this year will be held on May 4, 2026, following which the “Costume Art” exhibition will run from May 10 to January 10 next year. The Gala will be hostel by Anthony Vaccarello, Zoë Kravitz, Sabrina Carpenter and Doja Cat, amongst others, while Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman and Venus Williams will chair the event.