There’s a particular kind of electricity that ripples through the fashion world whenever the Met Gala announces its leaders for the year, and the 2026 edition has delivered a lineup that feels less like a committee and more like a constellation. Beyoncé. Nicole Kidman. Venus Williams. Anna Wintour. Four women who, in their own distinct ways, understand the art of showing up and transforming a staircase into a stage.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art will open its spring Costume Institute exhibition titled Costume Art, a meditation on clothing and the bodies they shape, support, disguise, and celebrate. And as co-chairs, Beyoncé, Kidman, Williams, and Wintour anchor the moment with cultural force: entertainers, athletes, and fashion architects converging to usher in the museum’s newest chapter.
For Beyoncé, this marks a return nearly ten years in the making. She last graced the Met steps in 2016, shimmering in Givenchy Haute Couture at the Manus x Machina gala. Kidman and Williams, on the other hand, feel almost like fixtures at this point. Both were present this past May at the Superfine gala, wearing looks that echoed their personal worlds: Kidman in sculptural, vintage-leaning Balenciaga and Williams in a tennis-skirt-meets-cape ensemble by Lacoste that nodded to sport as style vocabulary.
The committee continues to widen its creative circle. Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz will co-chair the 2026 Host Committee, joined by a mix of familiar and emerging names: Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Gwendoline Christie, Alex Consani, Misty Copeland, Elizabeth Debicki, Lena Dunham, Paloma Elsesser, LISA, Chloe Malle, Sam Smith, Teyana Taylor, Lauren Wasser, Anna Weyant, A’ja Wilson, Yseult and others still to be announced. It is the kind of roster that hints at a gala calibrated to reflect not just star power, but perspective.
At the center of it all is Costume Art itself. Curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition digs beneath fashion’s glittering surfaces to examine the body as both frame and canvas. Organised around thematic body types—from the naked form to the pregnant form to the ageing form—the show pulls from The Met’s vast collections. Historic silhouettes will sit beside contemporary constructions, all displayed in the museum’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a sweeping 12,000-square-foot home built for moments exactly like this.
Bolton describes the exhibition as a refocusing. Instead of privileging fashion’s visual drama, he turns our attention to its physicality, the way garments cling, shape, shield, reveal. “I wanted to connect artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form,” he says. It is fashion not as spectacle, but as skin-adjacent storytelling.
Of course, the Met Gala remains, at its heart, a fundraiser. Proceeds will support the Costume Institute’s exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and operations. Costume Art opens to the public from 10 May 2026 to 10 January 2027. The dress code, as always, will be announced in due time. And when it comes, it will no doubt set the tone for yet another night where art and attire meet at the highest, most theatrical point of the staircase.
