The Met Gala Themes, Year by Year

The Met Gala theme is set by the Costume Institute exhibition it opens each year, and, 2027 Met Gala theme is “John Galliano: Horizons,” celebrating the four-decade career of the iconic British fashion designer. The 2026 theme was Costume Art, with the dress code Fashion is Art. Themed galas began under Diana Vreeland in the 1970s. Before that the event was a fundraiser with a guest list and no costume brief at all.

The short version

• The Met Gala started in 1948, founded by fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, with tickets at fifty dollars.
• It was not themed for its first quarter century. Themes arrived after Diana Vreeland became a Costume Institute consultant in 1972.
• Anna Wintour has chaired the gala since 1995, with the single exception of 1996.
• The 2020 gala was cancelled because of the pandemic, the only recent gap in the sequence.
• The theme is always the spring Costume Institute exhibition. The dress code is a separate, looser instruction to guests.

What is the Met Gala theme this 2027?

The 2027 Met Gala theme is “John Galliano: Horizons,” celebrating the four-decade career of the iconic British fashion designer. The event will take place on Monday, May 3, 2027, supporting the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s spring Costume Institute exhibition.

What was the Met Gala theme in 2026?

For 2026 it was Costume Art, the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, curated by Andrew Bolton and on view from 10 May 2026 to 10 January 2027. The gala itself was held on Monday 4 May 2026, and the dress code given to guests was Fashion is Art.

Note the gap between those two dates. The gala happens before the exhibition opens to the public, which is the entire point: the evening is the fundraiser that pays for the show. Guests are dressing for something almost nobody in the room has seen yet.

Met Gala themes by year

When did the Met Gala first have a theme?

In the 1970s, after Diana Vreeland arrived. This is the question people actually mean when they ask when the Met Gala started being a fashion event, and the two dates are twenty-four years apart.

The gala began in 1948 as a midnight supper organised by Eleanor Lambert to fund the newly formed Costume Institute. Tickets cost fifty dollars. It was a New York society fundraiser, held in various venues, with no costume instruction and very little to do with the museum’s galleries.

Vreeland became a consultant to the Costume Institute in 1972, after a career editing Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue. She turned the exhibitions into events and the gala into the party that opened them. From that point the evening had a subject, and dressing for it became part of attending.

Anna Wintour took over as chair in 1995, and everything most people associate with the modern gala, the guest list, the steps, the global coverage, the fundraising scale, belongs to that era rather than to either founding moment. Our fuller history is at what is the Met Gala.

Who decides the theme and the dress code?

The Costume Institute decides the exhibition, which is a curatorial decision made years in advance and driven by scholarship, collection strength and what can actually be borrowed. Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge, is the person whose research the theme comes out of.

The dress code is a different and much newer thing. It is a translation of a scholarly exhibition title into something a guest can dress to, and it is deliberately loose. Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion was an exhibition about fragile historic garments too delicate to be worn. The Garden of Time, its dress code, was a J.G. Ballard short story. Guests were not asked to interpret the exhibition. They were given a mood.

That separation exists because the alternative produced bad results. When guests interpret a curatorial title literally, the carpet fills with costume rather than clothing, and the museum ends up illustrated by its own party.

Which themes actually worked?

Three tend to come up whenever people in the industry argue about this.

Camp: Notes on Fashion, 2019. Built on Susan Sontag’s essay, and the rare theme that gave guests permission to be genuinely strange. The people who understood it produced the best red carpet of the modern era. The people who did not wore sequins.

Heavenly Bodies, 2018. The Costume Institute’s most attended exhibition, and the most theologically loaded theme it has attempted. It could have gone very badly and mostly did not, largely because the Vatican’s loan of ecclesiastical garments gave the show a scholarly spine that the party could not undermine.

China: Through the Looking Glass, 2015. The one that is still argued about. The exhibition itself was explicit that it dealt with Western fantasies of China rather than with China, a distinction that survived approximately nobody’s red carpet interpretation. It remains the clearest case study in how a careful curatorial argument becomes a costume party, and it sits directly on the territory we cover in cultural appropriation and IP infringement in fashion.

Why does the theme matter beyond one night?

Because it sets a commercial cycle in motion within hours.

A Met Gala look now generates rapid-turnaround versions on fast fashion sites before the coverage has finished running, which raises questions about where interpretation ends and copying begins. The garments themselves are frequently custom, often archival, and occasionally museum property, which makes the reproduction question sharper than for an ordinary runway look. We took that apart in the Met Gala effect and where inspiration ends.

For the two most recent years in detail, see our coverage of Costume Art and the 2026 gala and of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style in 2025.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Met Gala 2026 theme?

Costume Art, the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition curated by Andrew Bolton, which opened to the public on 10 May 2026 and runs to 10 January 2027. The dress code for guests was Fashion is Art.

When did the Met Gala start?

1948, founded by the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert as a fundraising supper for the Costume Institute. Tickets cost fifty dollars, and the event had no theme for its first two decades.

What year did the Met Gala first have a theme?

Themed galas were introduced after Diana Vreeland joined the Costume Institute as a consultant in 1972. Before that it was a society fundraiser rather than a fashion event.

What is the difference between the theme and the dress code?

The theme is the exhibition the gala opens, chosen by curators years ahead. The dress code is a separate, deliberately loose instruction given to guests so they interpret a mood rather than illustrate a scholarly title.

Was there a Met Gala in 2020?

No. The 2020 gala was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The event returned in September 2021 with In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, which is why 2021 and 2022 ran unusually close together.

Who chooses the Met Gala theme?

The Costume Institute, through its curator in charge, currently Andrew Bolton. The decision is curatorial and follows what the collection and available loans can actually support, not what would make the best party.