We love the Met Gala. The looks are genuinely unhinged in the best way, the fashion is incredible, and your entire For You Page turns into a runway recap for 48 hours straight. We are not here to cancel fashion’s biggest night.
But this year, there’s a lot more happening on those steps than couture — and if you care about sustainable fashion, it’s worth actually talking about.
Met Gala 2026 Theme: How Does “Fashion Is Art” Compare to Past Years?
The 2025 Met Gala theme was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” a genuinely rich exploration of Black dandyism as a cultural and historical lens for Black identity, resistance, and style innovation. The year before that, the 2024 theme “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” prompted some of the most thoughtful sustainable dressing the red carpet has ever seen. Charli XCX showed up in a Marni look made from patchworked vintage t-shirts. Amanda Seyfried wore deadstock Prada fabric from 2009. Billie Eilish once arrived in a custom Gucci gown built entirely from pre-existing materials, saying “we didn’t have to waste a bunch of stuff, and I wanted to be as eco-friendly as possible.”
This year the theme is “Fashion Is Art.” The dress code is also “Fashion Is Art.” Which is, as one outlet put it, delightfully vague. No sustainability angle, no social lens, no cultural reclamation. Just art. And the sponsor is the founder of one of the largest fast fashion enablement platforms on the planet. Make it make sense.
Where Does Met Gala Money Go? Is It Worth the $100,000 Ticket Price?
This is the part that actually deserves some nuance, because it’s not nothing. The Costume Institute is the only curatorial department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art required to fund its own operations. Without the Met Gala, it doesn’t exist the way it does. Last year the gala raised a record $31 million, before the exhibit even opened to the public. This year’s event is funding a brand new 12,000 square foot gallery space that will be open to everyone.
That matters. Museums are one of the few places where ordinary people can stand in front of something priceless and just look at it. The Costume Institute has given us exhibitions on Black dandyism, on the fragility of archival fashion, on the Catholic imagination in clothing. That work has real value and it takes real money.
So the fundraising piece is genuinely good. The question is who’s doing the funding, and what that costs everyone else.
Jeff Bezos Is Sponsoring the Met Gala 2026. Here’s Why That’s a Problem.
At the peak of the original Gilded Age in 1913, the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families held about 0.85% of the country’s total wealth. Today, the richest 0.00001% of Americans have surpassed that. The richest 0.01%, roughly 18,000 families, now hold 10% of the country’s wealth, compared to 9% at the Gilded Age peak.
We are not in a new Gilded Age. We are past it.
\Bezos’s net worth grew $15 billion in 2025 alone, reaching $268 billion. Half of Amazon’s workers made less than $37,181 last year. In the U.S., CEO pay grew roughly 20 times faster than worker wages over the past year. Average private-sector wages grew just 1.3% adjusted for inflation, while S&P 500 CEO pay jumped 25.6%.
One of the hallmarks of the original Gilded Age was the flaunting of great wealth. In 1897, New York’s elite threw a costume ball that became a symbol of the era’s excess. Tonight, with a $100,000 ticket price and a billionaire’s name on the door, that image is not exactly hard to conjure.
What Is the Ball Without Billionaires? The Other Met Gala Happening Tonight
While the red carpet was being rolled out uptown, hundreds of workers, organizers, and advocates gathered in the Meatpacking District for the Ball Without Billionaires, a worker-led fashion show organized by the SEIU, the Strategic Organizing Center, and the Amazon Labor Union. The models were current and former workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, The Washington Post, Starbucks, and Uber. The designers were emerging, immigrant, and BIPOC creatives.
The Met’s theme is “Fashion Is Art.” The counter-event’s theme: “Labor Is Art.”
That’s not a gimmick. That’s a real values statement delivered with creativity and intention, which is actually more on theme than half the looks that will hit the steps tonight.
Which Stars Are Skipping the Met Gala 2026 and Why It Matters
Meryl Streep and Zendaya are both sitting tonight out. Bella Hadid is also skipping, allegedly in protest of the Bezos sponsorship. Zendaya has shown up seven years running. Sitting this one out is a choice, and when fashion’s most credible names quietly decline their invites, it registers louder than any look on those steps.
But the list of absences runs longer than the confirmed protesters. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce stayed in Nashville. Timothée Chalamet skipped to catch a New York Knicks playoff game. Selena Gomez was in Los Angeles filming a music video. Harry Styles didn’t show, despite his rumored partner Zoë Kravitz attending. Ariana Grande, Priyanka Chopra, Nick Jonas, Jennifer Lopez, and Sydney Sweeney were also nowhere on those steps.
Were any of them making a statement? We genuinely don’t know. Not showing up isn’t automatically a boycott. People have schedules, conflicts, and reasons that have nothing to do with Jeff Bezos. But the volume of absences this year is hard to ignore either way.
The Met Gala 2026 and Sustainable Fashion: Why Labor Is Part of the Conversation
Sustainable fashion has always been about more than materials. It’s about the seamstress in the factory, the warehouse worker clocking ten-hour shifts, the delivery driver hitting impossible quotas. Even at $17 an hour, adjusted for inflation, Amazon’s recent wage raise is worth less in real terms than their previous one. The people who make the clothes, ship the clothes, and return the clothes are part of the sustainability conversation — whether the industry wants to include them or not.
The Ball Without Billionaires got that right. Ethically-minded designers dressing real workers in a celebration of labor as art, happening in the same city on the same night. Fashion doesn’t have to be exclusive to be beautiful. It doesn’t have to cost $100,000 a seat to be meaningful.
Watch the red carpet tonight. Enjoy the looks! Fashion is joyful and worth celebrating, and the Costume Institute’s work genuinely matters. But watch it knowing the full picture: the designers who never got an invite, the workers who walked a different runway this morning, and what it would actually look like if fashion gave back to everyone who makes it possible.
Please follow me on Instagram and TikTok @LexySilverstein, if you are interested in fashion but care about the planet. @LexySilverstein
