Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, and his wife, Rama Duwaji, are not expected to attend the Met Gala on May 4, according to a report citing unnamed sources.
The absence is notable because the city’s mayor has traditionally appeared at the gala, a fixture that has long linked municipal power with one of New York’s most visible cultural rituals. The event, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is chaired this year by Anna Wintour and is being funded in part by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez-Bezos.
The gala’s co-chairs include Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams. Anthony Vaccarello and Zoë Kravitz are serving as co-chairs of the Gala Host Committee, which also includes Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Gwendoline Christie, Alex Consani, and Misty Copeland.
The Met Gala is the public-facing prelude to the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition, and this year’s show, “Costume Art,” opens May 10 and runs into January. That timing gives the gala its familiar double role: a celebrity-heavy fundraiser, and a signal of how the museum wants fashion to be read in the broader culture.
If Mamdani does indeed stay away, the decision may register less as a social omission than as a small but telling shift in how New York’s political class chooses to engage with the city’s most scrutinized cultural stage.
