The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has revealed the co-chairs of next year's Met Gala, among them the originator of the Freakum Dress herself—pop superstar Beyoncé. The actor Nicole Kidman and the tennis legend Venus Williams will also join fashion maven Anna Wintour as co-chairs of the annual star-studded gala (officially the Costume Institute Benefit) on 4 Monday 2026.
The fashion designer Anthony Vaccarello and actor Zoë Kravitz will co-chair the gala's host committee, whose members include Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Gwendoline Christie, Alex Consani, Misty Copeland, Elizabeth Debicki, Lena Dunham (daughter of artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham), Paloma Elsesser, LISA, Chloe Malle, Sam Smith, Teyana Taylor, Lauren Wasser, artist Anna Weyant, A’ja Wilson and Yseult. Proceeds from the gala go toward the Costume Institute's budget for exhibitions, operations, acquisitions and publications.
The following week the Costume Institute will open Costume Art (10 May 2026-10 January 2027), the exhibition upon which the theme of the gala is based. The show will christen the Met’s new 12,000-sq.-ft Condé M. Nast Galleries flanking the museum’s Great Hall. Focusing on the relationship between garments and the human body over the development of the “Western” art canon, Costume Art will highlight the diversity in corporeal archetypes over time by pairing 200 works from the museum’s collection with 200 pieces of apparel and accessories.
“For the Costume Institute’s inaugural exhibition in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, I wanted to focus on the centrality of the dressed body within the museum, connecting artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form," Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge for the Costume Institute, said in a statement. "Rather than prioritising fashion’s visuality, which often comes at the expense of the corporeal, Costume Art privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.”
Lauren Sánchez Bezos and her husband, Amazon founder and ally of US president Donald Trump Jeff Bezos, are sponsoring the event. The exhibition’s theme has been interpreted as a Trump-era retreat from politics after last year’s show, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, which traced the historical roots of Black dandyism in fashion.
The co-chairs' commitments to high fashion are well-known. Academy Award-winner Nicole Kidman is a current Balenciaga brand ambassador and longtime collaborator with super-stylist Julia Von Boehm. Sports champion Venus Williams leveraged her partnership with Reebok to transform the aesthetic of tennis in the popular imagination, using her degree in fashion design from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale to start her own fashion brand, EleVen, which wound down operations in 2024.
Beyoncé last appeared at the Met Gala ten years ago wearing a nude-illusion Givenchy dress, but over her decades-long career, it was often the creative flair of her mother, Tina Knowles, that defined her aesthetic from her time in the girl group Destiny’s Child to her own mononymous genre-bending solo act. The mother-daughter duo collaborated on the now-shuttered House of Deréon line, immortalised in Beyoncé’s song 2008 Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It). Beyoncé has employed a bevy of stylists over the years, but the primary architect of her fashion evolution is Zerina Akers, who curated the star's look for her culture-shaking Formation music video in 2017. Beyonce and her husband Jay-Z also preside over a vast art collection valued in the tens of millions of dollars, including two private commissions by blue-chip darling Damien Hirst and several works by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
