Key Takeaways

• Beyoncé’s return to the Met Gala marks her first appearance in ten years as a 2026 co-chair.
• Venus Williams and Nicole Kidman also join the co-chair lineup, bringing star power from sports and film.
• The 2026 exhibition will explore fashion’s relationship with the human body inside The Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries.

The Met Gala is already shaping up to be a moment next year. Vogue announced that Beyoncé, Venus Williams, and Nicole Kidman will join Anna Wintour as co-chairs at the 2026 event, bringing together music, film, sports, and fashion under one roof. For fans, Beyoncé’s appointment is especially major — it marks her first Met Gala appearance in a decade. She last walked the carpet in 2016 for the “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” event, wearing a custom Givenchy Haute Couture look that sparked plenty of conversation at the time.

Kidman and Williams are coming in as Met veterans. Both attended the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” Gala this past spring, where Kidman wore a sculptural Balenciaga silhouette, and Williams opted for a custom Lacoste tennis skirt, polo, and cape. Wintour continues in her longtime leadership role, anchoring a new era for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most-watched night.

The all-female slate marks a shift from this year’s all-male group, which included Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, and Pharrell Williams. This time, the Costume Institute is embracing a different kind of statement with “Costume Art,” the theme of its upcoming exhibition on May 4.

Everything to know about the 2026 Met Gala theme

Curated by Andrew Bolton, the show will explore the relationship between clothing and the human body through a range of “thematic body types,” including the Naked Body, the Pregnant Body, and the Aging Body. As Bolton explained in a release shared by Vogue, “I wanted to focus on the centrality of the dressed body within the museum, connecting artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form.” He added, “Rather than prioritizing fashion’s visuality, which often comes at the expense of the corporeal, ‘Costume Art’ privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.”

The exhibition will be the first to occupy The Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot space adjacent to the Great Hall. It will also be supported by a host committee co-chaired by Zoë Kravitz and fashion designer Anthony Vaccarello. The committee includes a wide-ranging group of artists and cultural figures, including Doja Cat, Teyana Taylor, A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Carpenter, Sam Smith, Misty Copeland, Paloma Elsesser, LISA, and more.