For one night every May, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are transformed into the most photographed runway on earth. This year, the runway looked more like a gallery wall. On Monday, May 4, celebrities, designers and tastemakers ascended those famous stairs in gowns embroidered with brushstrokes, sculpted to mimic Greek marble and even hand-painted to look like oil on linen– all to follow the theme: “Fashion Is Art.”
WHAT IS THE MET GALA?
The Met Gala is the annual fundraising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the only department at the Met for itself. Vogue’s Anna Wintour has chaired the event since 1995, and each year’s dress code is tied to the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition. This year’s co-chairs were Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Wintour herself. Saint Laurent and Condé Nast helped sponsor the night, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary chairs and lead sponsors.
The 2026 exhibition, “Costume Art,” introduces the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, which span almost 12,000 square feet of new exhibition space. The show puts roughly 400 garments from the Costume Institute in direct conversation with artworks from across the entire Met collection, from prehistoric pieces to global contemporary works.
Clothing has always been one of the ways human beings depict the body, just like sculpture and painting. The dress code, “Fashion Is Art,” asked guests to show up wearing garments that could be considered art, depicted art or were made in collaboration between designers and artists.
The Met Gala always attracts creativity from its guests, and as always some of them really took the homework seriously, going above and beyond. Here is a breakdown of looks that turned themselves into living paintings, and how well they pulled it off.
THE LOOKS THAT BECAME PAINTINGS
- Gracie Abrams: Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and “The Kiss” (Chanel by Matthieu Blazy). Dripping in gold embroidery and chain-draped chiffon, Abrams looked like she had been dipped straight into Klimt’s “Golden or Art Nouveau Period.” The off-the-shoulder neckline and gilded mosaic textures mirrored exactly what Klimt was doing with actual gold leaf in 1907.
Rating: 9/10, as it one of the most literal art-history transformations of the night.
- Charli XCX: Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” (Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello). Charli wore a sheer black tulle and silk gown built around a single resin iris, a direct nod to Yves Saint Laurent’s own 1988 Van Gogh tribute collection.
Rating: 8.5/10 it was subtle, but if you knew, you knew.
- Naomi Watts: Dutch still-life painting in the tradition of Rachel Ruysch (Dior by Jonathan Anderson). Watts wore a black sculptural gown layered with chiffon and three-dimensional embroidered flowers, plus a floral updo and a manicure of 30 hand-sculpted flowers that took five hours to install. She did not just reference a still life, she literally became the bouquet.
Rating: 9/10
- Sabine Getty: The painted nude (Ashi Studio). Getty arrived in a hand-painted corset that mimicked bare skin so accurately that people online genuinely asked if she had been generated by artificial intelligence. The technique echoed 18th-century trompe-l’œil painting and the centuries-old tradition of the nude in Western art, perfectly in line with the exhibition’s “Naked Body” section.
Rating: 10/10 for concept and execution.
- Kendall Jenner: The “Winged Victory of Samothrace” (GapStudio by Zac Posen). What began as a basic white Gap T-shirt was hand-dyed in tea and draped to evoke the “wet drapery” of the Hellenistic marble sculpture, also known as the Nike of Samothrace. Jenner later debuted a massive detachable wingspan inside the gala, featuring a photographic print of the statue itself spanning nearly the width of the red carpet.
Rating: 9.5/10 for translating one of the Louvre’s most iconic sculptures through, of all things, a Gap T-shirt.
- Emma Chamberlain: Impressionism itself (Mugler, hand-painted by artist Anna Deller-Yee). Instead of copying one painting, Chamberlain’s gown was one. Deller-Yee used real fine-art paints, no fashion dyes, with roughly 30 base colors, 40 hours of painting time and four days of drying to build thick, glossy Impressionist brushstrokes across the fabric. Chamberlain, whose father is a painter, called it deeply personal.
Rating: 10/10, as it resembles an impasto-on-canvas technique and blurs the line between canvas and couture more than anything else on the carpet.
THE TAKEAWAY
The Met Gala is always more about costume than fashion, but “Fashion Is Art” took it to a whole different level. The best looks of the night were not just inspired by art, they were art. Some even on par with the art inside of the museum, not just walking up the steps outside it.
Sources:
The Met — Costume Art / Met Gala 2026
W Magazine — 14 Best Art References at the 2026 Met Gala
WWD — Every Art History Reference on the 2026 Met Gala Red Carpet
WWD — Emma Chamberlain’s Met Gala Dress Took 40 Hours to Paint
Just Jared — Charli XCX Honors YSL’s Tribute to Van Gogh
Bustle — Inside Naomi Watts’ Floral Met Gala Look
BuzzFeed — Sabine Getty’s Sculpted Naked Dress
E! News — Met Gala 2026 Cochair vs Host Committee
