Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams Will Co-Chair the 2026 Met Gala
Written by admin on December 10, 2025
Mid last month, The Metropolitan Museum of Art revealed the theme of its annual spring fashion exhibit, which opens every year in May following the Met Gala. Per Andrew Bolton, chief curator in charge at The Met’s Costume Institute, “Costume Art” will highlight the prominence of the “dressed body” in the museum’s collections.
This morning, the museum and Vogue have announced the co-chairs for the 2026 Met Gala. Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams, three of the most celebrated women in music, film and sports, respectively, will serve as co-chairs together with Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and Vogue global editorial director.
This particular exhibition and its accompanying gala will mark a momentous occasion for the Costume Institute. “Costume Art” will be the inaugural exhibition at the department’s nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, named after the founder of the media company as the result of an undisclosed lead gift. (The project has an estimated value of over $50 million.) Located adjacent to the museum’s Great Hall, the Costume Institute’s new public-facing home is giving fashion a central location in the museum and allowing its blockbuster exhibitions more time in the sun, in an effort to certify its significance within the arts at large.
“Costume Art” will pair paintings, sculptures, and other objects in the museum in relation to garments from the Costume Institute’s collection. At the crux of the exhibition is the way fashion, and more specifically the “dressed body,” exists within every single gallery of the museum and connects all collections and curatorial departments. The late 5th century BCE terracotta statuette of Nike, for one, will sit alongside a pleated gown from the 1920s by Adèle Henriette Elisabeth Nigrin Fortuny and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo. The analogue to Hans Bellmer’s La Poupeé from the ’30s will be a similarly bulbous ensemble by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons.
The presence of Beyoncé, Kidman, and Williams will help elucidate the theme of this year’s exhibition.
Rivaled only by Rihanna, Beyoncé is easily one of the most talked about and anticipated presences at the Met Gala. She has not attended since 2016, despite having cemented herself as one of the best-dressed attendees in the past, most famously as the evening’s last arrival (an unofficial honor reserved only to the biggest names in entertainment) in a Givenchy Haute Couture feathered gown in 2012. A component of her attendance that will surely flame fan discourse online is Beyconé’s ongoing musical trilogy, which started in 2022 with Renaissance and continued with the release of Cowboy Carter in 2024. The unannounced Act III, as it is referred to by her fan base, is presumably coming in 2026. That Beyoncé has made fashion and costume a crucial component of her work at large and particularly of this ongoing trilogy, collaborating with designers like Olivier Rousteing at Balmain for Renaissance and with Levi’s for a Western-infused denim capsule timed to Cowboy Carter, will contextualize Bolton’s theme within pop culture: The dressed body is omnipresent in the arts, and it has become a crucial tool for musicians today.
Together with her sister Serena Williams, Venus has helped change the face and look of tennis: Most recently, at the 2025 US Open, she collaborated with a host of luxury labels unrelated to the world of sports, bringing custom designs by Khaite, Luar, and ERL from the runway to the court.
Kidman has become a staple at the Met Gala, most memorably wearing the Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld dress she donned in a Baz Luhrmann–directed commercial for the brand at the 2023 event that honored the late designer. Kidman is one of the silver screen’s most chameleonic stars, leveraging fashion—and some great wigs—to shapeshift between, say, the celebrated author Virginia Woolf or a red-headed witch alongside Sandra Bullock.
The 2026 Met Gala is already generating great buzz, but it has not come without some controversy. When Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos were revealed as title sponsors of this year’s Met Gala (which has additional funding from Saint Laurent and Condé Nast), the tone of the conversation around the forthcoming event shifted from celebratory to skeptical. Many on the internet are wary of billionaires—even people who employ their very platforms to disparage them. After unfounded rumors of the Bezoses possibly acquiring Vogue circled around earlier this year following the magazine’s coverage of their wedding in June, the fashion contingent online, plus a few tabloids, speculated on the deeper meaning of their participation in this year’s Met Gala. Bezos has attended the event repeatedly in the past, and was honorary chair in 2012 when Amazon sponsored the gala, attending with his then wife MacKenzie Scott.
This is not the first time that a couple has independently underwritten the Costume Institute’s exhibition and its accompanying gala. Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine, did so in 2018, as did David and Julia Koch in 1997. The plaza outside of the Metropolitan Museum, inaugurated in 2014, is also named after David Koch, who donated $65 million to the project.
A particularity of the Costume Institute at The Met is that it is self-funded, unlike the museum’s other departments. The Met Gala, which raised a record $31 million in 2025 according to museum officials, is the department’s primary source of funding. (Its annual budget has been reported to hover around $20 million.) While the gala is to cover the operational costs of the Costume Institute, which include acquisitions, preservation, and operations, the resources for the event itself still have to come from somewhere.
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