THE VANITY EXHIBITION: MET GALA

It always takes place on the first Monday in May a ritual more predictable than shifts in fast fashion trends and more exclusive than anything that merely pretends to be exclusive. This year, it falls on May 4. Seemingly a date like any other, and yet it is on this very evening that New York transforms into a runway, where clothing ceases to be clothing and becomes a statement. Or at least an aspiration toward one.

In 1948, no one was talking about the show. It was a dinner party. Eleanor Lambert, a woman who understood fashion before fashion began to understand itself, organized an event that was meant to be practical: to raise funds for the newly established Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No dramatic trains trailing down the stairs, no outfits requiring a team of engineers and logistics. A dress was a dress. A suit was a suit. And money how cliché was the goal.

Today, the Costume Institute is a temple. Over 33,000 objects, seven centuries of history, fabrics that have outlived empires, and styles that have endured longer than many a cultural movement. Conservation labs, a library off limits to the average mortal, and access reserved for the select few: researchers, students, and designers. Fashion in its most paradoxical form as something simultaneously fleeting and archival, mundane and sacred.

However, the Met Gala wasn’t always what it is today. For years, it remained a local event, confined to New York’s elite circles. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a transformation took place, and as is often the case in fashion, we owe it all to one woman: Diana Vreeland. She was the former editor in chief of Vogue, a visionary, and a curator of fantasy. It was she who introduced the theme, turning the dinner into a narrative, and the narrative into a spectacle. The first theme? A tribute to Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1973, a year after his death. A symbolic beginning: fashion begins to tell its own story.

From that moment on, everything spiraled out of control in the best possible way, of course. The freedom designers, stylists, and celebrities have to interpret the theme has created a space where the line between genius and absurdity is almost invisible. Some are viewed with admiration, others with consternation, and most with a mix of both emotions. Because the Met Gala isn’t a fashion show. It’s theater. Sometimes an opera. Sometimes a farce.

This year’s theme: Fashion Is Art, and the exhibition: Costume Art. It sounds like something you have to say out loud to believe it makes sense. The relationship between clothing and the body is a topic as old as fashion itself, yet it’s still treated like the discovery of the season. Does clothing exist without the body? Does the body exist without the context provided by an outfit? Or perhaps both are just a pretext for a story about power, identity, and control? Fashion loves to ask questions it has no intention of answering.

This year, however, something is emerging that seeks to push boundaries not aesthetic ones, but social ones. For the first time in the Met Gala’s 78-year history, the outfits will be presented on mannequins inspired by real, diverse bodies. Not perfect, not retouched, not conforming to a single standard. Bodies with disabilities, pregnant bodies, bodies that for decades have been, at best, a metaphor in fashion. It is a gesture that can easily be seen as groundbreaking or, just as easily, as decades too late. Fashion is once again trying to catch up with a reality it has ignored for years.

And then we return to the numbers, because they best reveal the true nature of this “vanity fair.” In 1948, a ticket cost $85. In 2025, $75,000 per person. A table? Starting at $350,000. The celebrities, of course, don’t pay; they’re invited, dressed, and sponsored. Their presence is the currency. In 2025, the gala generated $30 million in revenue. Philanthropy at its most luxurious, the kind that requires the right lighting and a red carpet.

This year’s honorary co-chairs, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, fit perfectly into this narrative. Money meets fashion, fashion meets power, and together they pretend it’s all about art. Controversy? Of course. Because it’s hard to separate the spectacle from the context in which it’s created. And maybe that’s exactly the point so that no one feels entirely comfortable, even if they’re wearing a dress worth more than an apartment.

The Met Gala has never been just about clothes. It’s an event about who gets to be seen, who gets to speak, and who can afford to pretend that none of it matters.

And the ending? Like any good story about fashion, there isn’t one. Because when the lights go out and the stairs empty, only one question remains: was it art, or just a very expensive illusion that we all agreed to believe in for a moment? Like a photograph from years ago, where everyone looks elegant, but no one knows yet that it’s already in the past.

And perhaps that is precisely why the Met Gala still fascinates us not for what it is, but for what it once could have been.

Photos:
Met Gala, circa 1960
The Costume Institute Benefit, 1948

Photographs:
Penske Media (Contributor), Getty Images
United States Information Agency, PhotoQuest, Getty Images
Ben Martin, Getty Images
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Kevin Mazur / MG24 / Getty Images for The Met Museum / Vogue
Press materials
Photo: Paul Westlake
Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen © The Metropolitan Museum of Art