The Met Gala’s billionaire moment

The annual Met Gala, held this year on Monday, May 4, is always at the center of controversy. Was Karl Lagerfeld too problematic to be the theme of 2023? Was TikTok, considered a national security threat by the US government, a suitable sponsor for the 2024 premiere? How small can designers make Kim Kardashian’s waist? (This occurs almost every year.)

But the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2026 gala celebrating “The Art of Costume,” an exhibition that brings together examples of clothed bodies from across its curatorial departments, was particularly contentious.

was chosen in the middle increasing social anxiety New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that he would skip the A-list meeting due to income inequality. “My focus is also on affordability and making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, and I want to spend most of my time focused on that,” he told the news site. Hell’s Gate last month.

There is also the issue of the night’s sponsors. While fashion brands or tech giants like Instagram usually take on the event, this year Amazon co-founder and chairman Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, became the main donors of the event. They are also honorary presidents. (Co-chairs Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Vogue’s Anna Wintour remain official presenters, while Saint Laurent is sponsoring the exhibition catalogue.)

After the Met announced the Bezoses’ attendance, many social media users who were the Met Gala’s most enthusiastic supporters, following Vogue’s livestream and analyzing the looks days later, called for a boycott. This materialized as actual protests by groups such as Everybody Hates Elon (as did Musk); Over the past few weeks, the group has covered New York City with posters calling for a boycott. “Bezos Met Gala: Worker exploitation brought to you,” one reads, referencing long-running allegations of labor violations at Amazon’s e-commerce business.

Repeated criticism hasn’t stopped the gala from raising enormous funds: Last year, it brought in a record $31 million. (By contrast, the New York Philharmonic’s Opening Gala raised $3.3 million in 2025.)

Max Hollein, the museum’s director and chief executive officer, said he sees the Met Gala as part of the “history of American philanthropy” in which people across the political spectrum support culture and other causes. “Right now maybe there’s an added layer of scrutiny to this, an added layer of caution,” he said. “But we will always be grateful for this support from a variety of different sources.”

The Met Gala is the primary fundraiser for the Met Costume Institute, which is home to more than 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries. (It is often repeated that the Costume Institute is the only museum department that raises its own funds, but this is not true; each department receives money from the museum’s general operational budget and supplements it through fundraising.)

Funds from the gala support the purchase of clothing and accessories, as well as the institute’s reference library, which includes over 800 periodicals and 1,500 designer files on the history of fashion and clothing, dating back to the sixteenth century. Funds also support a conservation laboratory and storage space, as well as the Costume Institute’s gallery spaces, including the 4,300-square-foot Anna Wintour Costume Center and the nearly 12,000-square-foot brand new Condé M. Nast Galleries. The salaries of the 29 staff also come from gala funds. Located in the immediate vicinity of the museum’s Great Hall, the new galleries will allow Costume Institute exhibitions to remain open much longer and increase the reach and scope of the department’s exhibitions.

“This is one of the greatest fashion and costume collections,” Hollein said. Preservation and storage are “more challenging and more expensive” than drawings or paintings, he said. “When we talk about the Met Gala, I think it’s really important for people to understand that the money is really going towards preserving this collection.”

What causes the most controversy is the presence of boldface names and the large amount of money surrounding the event. Over the past two decades, Wintour has helped transform the party from a typical charity fundraiser into a celebrity-driven phenomenon; This effort, along with ever-increasing ticket prices for gala attendees, has led to increasingly larger goals for the museum. Individual tickets are priced at $100,000 for 2026, table prices are $350,000, and guests must be invited by the museum to purchase tickets.

The perception that the event is tone-deaf means that critics are willing to scream hypocrisy when, for example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wears a dress that says “Tax the Rich” (as she did in 2021). Last year, Kennedy heir (and former Met Gala attendee) Jack Schlossberg, who is currently running a congressional campaign in Manhattan, called for a boycott of the event in an Instagram post, citing “too much going on around the world and at home.” (This article was later deleted.)

For many, it is the Bezoses’ involvement, not the museum, that deserves criticism. On the morning of the gala, a group of organizations including the Service Employees International Union, the Center for Strategic Organizing, and the Amazon Workers Union will hold a Ball Without Billionaires, a fashion show in downtown New York where employees from businesses like Amazon, Whole Foods, and The Washington Post (all affiliated with Bezos) as well as Starbucks and Uber will serve as models, wearing clothes from ethically-minded designers.

“If there’s enough money to sponsor this gala, there should be money to pay workers fairly,” said Cindy Castro, a New York-based designer who immigrated to the United States from Ecuador and whose pieces will be featured at Monday’s event.

“I want to raise awareness about the safety issues we have at Amazon warehouses,” said April Watson, an Amazon Warehouse worker in Northeast Georgia who will model on Monday’s show. He said he and his colleagues were under pressure to pick and pack faster and faster, receiving warnings that could lead to their dismissal if their speed dropped below 5%. “When I try to work quickly with very heavy items, it’s easy for me to do too much, which causes me to get injured.”

He continued: “I want to do what I can to help bring about systemic change that will make the warehouse safer for workers like me.”

An Amazon spokesperson said of warehouse workers’ expectations in a statement to CNN: “Safety is our top priority and is at the heart of everything we do. Amazon does not have fixed quotas at our facilities. Instead, we evaluate performance against safe and achievable expectations and take into account time and tenure, peer performance, and adherence to safe work practices.”

This isn’t the first time Bezos has been the honorary chairman of the Met Gala. In 2012, Amazon sponsored the gala and the tech giant hosted the honorary award, posing with the likes of Wintour, Miuccia Prada and Carey Mulligan.

While Watson wasn’t working at Amazon at the time (he joined the company in 2021), “My perception of him was different,” he said.

At the time, Bezos’ fortune was estimated at $18.4 billion, according to Forbes, making him the 26th richest person in the world. Now, is worth an estimated $224 billion and ranks fourth.

These days, Watson said, “Jeff Bezos almost seems like royalty. He’s very rich, and I know he’s the one who started Amazon; he’s very creative and a good organizer. He built it. And now I feel like we’re celebrating his success, and these lowly people don’t care about us.”

The Bezoses’ recent high-profile outings – including a lavish wedding in Venice A series of shows at Paris Couture Week in January – also made the gap between their own lifestyle and the lifestyles of others more apparent. This made them a more visible target.

Still, without their support, this year’s Met Gala might have been more modest in scale, promoting fashion as an art form and the idea that celebrities can create a narrative through clothes that entertain us and even help us better understand our world.

“The important thing is that you have to evaluate the integrity of the institution, the depth of our program and the proper use of those funds,” Hollein said.

He said it was the ethos and initiatives of the museum and the Costume Institute that the Bezoses were funding, not the donor’s personal agenda. “This is not a show on Amazon. This is not a show about Lauren Sánchez’s dresses. It needs to be really clear that what our donors are supporting is the Met’s program, the ideas of our curators, and the integrity of the institution,” he said. “And they don’t want it any other way. These are exactly the donors we want, and these are the donors that museums like ours should have.”

Wintour told CNN In late 2025, Sánchez said Bezos would be “a wonderful asset to the museum and the event,” calling him a “great lover of costume and of course fashion.”

In fact, thanks to the Costume Institute and the Met Gala, many people see fashion the way it is today. Hollstein noted, for example, last year’s show on Black snobbery or this year’s show; this show will highlight “not only the dialogue about the clothed body between different arts, but also different body types.”

After all, the museum is a place where the world can access art, not a playground for donors.

“I’ve always wanted to see the Met museum. I love art,” Watson said. “Museums in general allow ordinary people—anyone—to come and see these priceless works of art face to face.”

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