From Rihanna’s medieval gown to Lisa’s 3D-scanned hands, these looks did more than show up.
The 2026 Met Gala took place on May 4 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as always, it was held to benefit the Costume Institute — the museum’s department dedicated to preserving and studying fashion history.
The theme this year is “Costume Art,” which explores how the dressed body appears across the Met’s entire collection. And not just the fashion department, but paintings, sculptures, artifacts, all of it. Curator Andrew Bolton built the exhibit around the idea that clothing has always been central to how art depicts the human form.
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Co-chairs were Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour. Honorary chairs were Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who reportedly donated between $10 and $20 million to fund a $50 million expansion of the Costume Institute. Their involvement wasn’t without controversy. Unions representing Amazon, Whole Foods, and Starbucks workers staged a “Ball Without Billionaires” counter-event downtown, while activist groups plastered the city with boycott posters, and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani skipped the gala entirely. Several fashion insiders and celebrities opted out as well.
At the end of the day, the Met Gala exists to fund one of the most important fashion collections in the world and the red carpet is where that mission gets its moment. These were the guests who took that seriously:
Rihanna in Maison Margiela
Rihanna showed up nine minutes after the red carpet officially wrapped. The Maison Margiela piece she wore was sculptural and pulled its visual cues from medieval Belgian architecture, specifically Flounders.
Madonna in Saint Laurent
The Queen of Pop went full dark enchantress. The Saint Laurent look was a floor-length satin and lace slip dress topped with a translucent violet organza cape — carried by seven ladies-in-waiting — finished with leather platform boots, a long dark wig, and a hat with a ghost ship sitting on top of it. The look was a nod to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who also inspired the visual direction of Madonna’s 1995 “Bedtime Story” music video. She has a new album dropping on July 3, and this was very much the announcement.
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Beyoncé in Olivier Rousteing
Her first time at the Met Gala in 10 years, Beyoncé came as a co-chair. Rousteing created a diamond-encrusted gown designed to look like a skeleton, paired with a headpiece and a feathered cape that shifted from beige into dark gray. Jay-Z was there too, and so was Blue Ivy, making her first-ever Met Gala appearance.
Emma Chamberlain in Mugler
Miguel Castro Freitas designed this one for Mugler, and it was painted entirely by hand — every inch of it. The look nodded to the house’s archives, pulling from a 1997 butterfly silhouette.
Gigi Hadid in Miu Miu
Hadid picked her favorite Miu Miu moments across two different decades, taking flame details from the spring 2011 runway and a sheer silhouette from spring 1998. The end result was something that felt genuinely hers.
Janelle Monáe in Christian Siriano
The gown was constructed using electrical cables, circuit board fragments, moss, and succulents. On top of that, it was made from upcycled materials and is fully recyclable after use. It was one of the few looks that managed to be both a statement on technology and the environment at the same time.
Ejae in Swarovski
Custom Swarovski and deeply layered in meaning, the piece honored Ejae’s Korean heritage while also drawing on two very different references: Venus de Milo, and 기녀 (Gisaeng), the female courtesans of Korea’s Joseon dynasty.
Lisa in Robert Wun
For her collaboration with Robert Wun, Lisa had her own arms and hands digitally scanned. Those scans became the basis for the sculptural elements draped across the look, which was rooted in classical Thai dance positions. Using your own body as the raw material for a dress is about as personal as fashion gets.
Jisoo in Dior
A column gown in blush pink, strapless, and covered in hand-embroidered garden imagery worked into gazar fabric. The floral bouquet detailing along the hem tied everything together. It had the patience and detail of something you’d find behind glass in a museum, don’t you think?
Hailey Bieber in Saint Laurent
The bodice on this Saint Laurent piece was actually molded using real 24-karat gold. Not a gold finish or a metallic fabric — actual gold. Getting a precious metal to bee something wearable requires a different level of craftsmanship entirely.
Anne Hathaway in Michael Kors
What made this one stand out was that it started with a poem. Artist James McGough created illustrations based on John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — a poem literally about the timelessness of art — and those illustrations were worked into the Michael Kors Collection gown.
Sabrina Carpenter in Dior
The look was made using actual film strips, and the film in question was the 1954 classic Sabrina, which also happens to her favorite film.
Gracie Abrams in Chanel
This Chanel gown clocked in at over 294 hours of construction time, with roughly 5,150 individual embroidery elements sewn in: crystals, sequins, and chains layered across golden lace and nude chiffon.
Kendall Jenner in GapStudio by Zac Posen
Her 12th Met Gala and first time working with Zac Posen, Kendall’s look was built around the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the headless ancient Greek goddess statue that greets you at the Louvre, wings and all. Posen started with a basic white Gap tee and worked outward from there, layering cotton-viscose, satin-face chiffon, and organza to recreate that rippling, windswept quality the statue is known for. A 3D-printed corset molded to Jenner’s exact body sat underneath it all.
Kim Kardashian in Allen Jones and Whitaker Malem
Designer Whitaker Malem teamed up with British Pop Art figure Allen Jones to create a molded breastplate and leather skirt. Jones has been making sculpture-as-furniture and body-as-art since the 1960s, so putting his work on a person at a fashion gala is like a natural extension of what he’s always done.
Blake Lively in Archival Versace
Blake picked a Versace piece from the spring 2006 archive and had the house rework it with a 13-foot train, the color choices pulled from 18th-century Venetian Rococo paintings.
Chase Infiniti in Thom Browne
The dress was designed to look like ancient Greek marble but was built entirely from 1.5 million sequins stacked together, plus tiered silk fringes in more than 600 shades. The whole point was the visual mismatch between what you see and what it actually is. That illusion takes serious engineering to pull off.
Ben Platt in Tanner Fletcher
Tanner Fletcher made him a silk-wool suit that was hand-painted and hand-embroidered to reference Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. That exact painting happens to be part of the Costume Art exhibit running inside the Met right now.
The 2026 Met Gala benefits the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The spring exhibition “Costume Art” is currently on view at the Met in New York City.
