Met Gala Protests Couldn’t Stop a Record $42 Million for the Costume Institute
The 2026 Met Gala arrived with a familiar mix of spectacle and scrutiny, but the fundraising total was the number that endured. Held on Monday, May 4, the event brought in a record $42 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, surpassing last year’s $31 million. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos served as honorary chairs, and the Bezoses reportedly contributed at least $10 million to the evening’s haul.
Outside the museum, the atmosphere was pointed rather than celebratory. Protesters gathered near the arrivals area with signs reading “Tax the Rich” and “Resistance Red Carpet.” The group Everyone Hates Elon also staged a more theatrical intervention, leaving around 300 fake bottles of urine inside the museum, each labeled with Jeff Bezos’s face and a slogan aimed at the couple. The gesture referenced the punishing conditions Amazon truck drivers have described, including the need to urinate in bottles to keep pace with deliveries.
Inside, the gala remained what it has long been: a highly choreographed display of wealth, social capital, and fashion as performance. Tickets cost $100,000 each, and the dress code, “fashion is art,” gave artists an unusually direct prompt. Amy Sherald, who sits on the event’s host committee, wore a custom Thom Browne look based on her own painting “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2013). Jordan Roth, the artist, actor, and stage performer, appeared in a Robert Wun ensemble with a faceless figure rising over his shoulder, a reference he said was tied to Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Pygmalion and Galatea.” Tschabalala Self took a quieter route, choosing a white-silk corseted gown by Brandon Blackwood. In comments to Artsy, she linked the garment’s layered textiles to her own practice and to Edgar Degas’s ballerina sculpture.
The gala also served as a preview for the Costume Institute’s next major exhibition, “Costume Art,” which opens May 10 and runs through January 10, 2027. The show will debut the Met’s new 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, a dedicated space that places fashion more visibly at the center of the museum’s exhibition program.
For the Bezoses, the evening followed another high-profile event shadowed by protest: their Venice wedding in summer 2025, which was widely reported to have cost between $47 million and $56 million. At the Met, however, the institution’s fundraising machine proved larger than the dissent around it — and the Costume Institute emerged with a record-setting result that will shape its next chapter.
