Pre-Met Primer
protests, piss bottles, prediction markets & pre-parties
Happy first Monday in May! You know what that means: the Tech Gala, excuse me, the Met Gala, is upon us!
The 2026 Met Gala, formally the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit, takes place tonight. The spring exhibition it supports is called Costume Art, an exploration of fashion as an embodied art form, and the dress code is “Fashion Is Art”, a theme that gives guests the widest possible interpretive runway, though if the rumored Silicon Valley contingent shows up looking like they raided a luxury rental service at Anna Wintour’s instruction, we may need to revisit what art means to men who have never worn collars voluntarily.
Who’s running the room
The official co-chairs are Beyoncé ( who hasn’t graced the carpet since 2016 ), Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour, whose title at Condé Nast is now chief content officer but whose functional role at the Met Gala remains what it has always been: the person the whole operation orbits around. The honorary co-chairs and lead sponsors are Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who reportedly paid at least $10 million to host the evening and sponsor its exhibition. That donation, and the visibility that came with it, is why you’ve been seeing the event referred to in coverage as “the Bezos Met Gala”, a framing that has proven extraordinarily difficult to shake. It is worth noting that this is not the Bezoses’ first Met rodeo: Bezos attended the 2012 gala with his then-wife MacKenzie Scott, and he and Lauren made their couple’s debut at the 2024 gala with her in custom Oscar de la Renta before skipping 2025 entirely. The escalation to lead sponsor and honorary co-chair this year has been extremely engineered.
The host committee is co-chaired by designer Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent, which also sponsors the exhibition catalogue, and actress Zoë Kravitz, with Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, and others rounding out the broader committee. Additional corporate support comes from Condé Nast, and the sponsorship architecture reportedly extends to layers involving Amazon, OpenAI, Meta, and Snap. The carpet will be heavy with contractual obligations tonight, Kidman to Chanel, Kravitz locked into Saint Laurent, Anne Hathaway will parade in Prada and with Vaccarello co-hosting, there will be no shortage of smoking suits and sexy little black dresses on the steps.
This is the first time a tech billionaire couple has occupied a lead sponsor and honorary chair role simultaneously at the Met Gala, and it has not gone unremarked upon. Individual tickets this year are priced at $100,000, up $25,000 from last year — while a table starts at $350,000, numbers that have circulated widely this week in a way that feels less like context and more like accelerant. As Amy Odell, author of Anna: The Biography, put it: what used to be a closed-door networking event for fashion people is now a big-box clout store for the richest people on the planet.
The protests
The backlash against the Bezos sponsorship has been organized, creative, and genuinely disruptive at the level of narrative, even if the physical actions have remained symbolic. The group behind it is Everyone Hates Elon, a UK-based anti-oligarch activist collective that cut its teeth on Musk-focused campaigns and pivoted here to Bezos. They raised between $10,000 and $13,000 and have centered their messaging on Amazon warehouse conditions, accounts of driver mistreatment including lawsuits and worker reports referencing urine bottles, Amazon contracts with ICE and CBP, Amazon’s ties to the Trump administration, and the broader politics of extreme wealth inequality — a combination that has made the Bezos involvement feel more loaded than a typical corporate sponsorship. Amazon has maintained that it offers competitive pay and benefits and complies with applicable laws.
The campaign began in mid-April with a wheatpasting blitz across New York City, covering subway stations, sidewalks, and the Upper East Side near the Met with posters reading “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala,” spoof ads referencing Amazon’s ICE ties, and Bezos imagery in satirical contexts. The group released the designs as free downloads, which accelerated the spread considerably.
On April 30th, activists placed over 300 miniature fake urine bottles inside the Metropolitan Museum itself, each labeled with a laughing photo of Bezos and a “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” tag, a direct reference to the Amazon driver allegations. Amazon admitted that some of its delivery drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles due to a lack of toilets. Staff removed the mini bottles, but the photos circulated widely.
In a follow-up move lifted from their playbook at Windsor Castle, the group slipped custom “commemorative plates” and novelty items into the Met gift shop — merchandise mocking the Bezoses with captions like “The Bezos Met Gala: The World’s Most Expensive Midlife Crisis” — before staff caught and pulled them.
Going into this week, the campaign escalated to nighttime building projections of boycott messages, a counter-event called “Ball Without Billionaires” organized by labor unions including SEIU and the Amazon Labor Union, and continued postering citywide. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be skipping the gala, noting that his focus is on affordability and making the most expensive city in the United States affordable. Bella Hadid and others have engaged supportively with the campaign online.
The pre-gala party
Before the main event, the Bezoses hosted their own on Saturday, May 2nd at their New York City residence in the NoMad neighborhood. The invitation arrived via email with the subject line “INVITE: Jeff and Lauren Bezos Invite You” — a disco-themed digital card featuring a stylized close-up profile of a face with glittering red lipstick and a slightly open mouth, reading: “Pre-Met celebration on May 2 at 8 p.m. Address: to come upon confirmation.” The withheld address was a deliberate move to limit protest exposure, with the location only revealed to guests upon RSVP.
Paparazzi captured guests arriving and departing throughout the evening, which is how we know who was there, and I’m sure there are others who made very sure not to be seen. Among the confirmed attendees: Kris Jenner and Kendall Jenner, Sam Smith with designer Christian Cowan, Nicole Kidman, Gayle King, Nicky Hilton, Donatella Versace, Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian, Venus Williams and Andrea Preti, Baz Luhrmann, Anna Wintour, Law Roach (who serves as an occasional stylist to Lauren), Ashley Graham and Justin Ervin, Brooks Nader, Lisa Rinna, Vittoria Ceretti, Grace Ann Nader, Lindsey Vonn, Laura Harrier, Stacey Bendet of Alice + Olivia, Tommy Hilfiger, Huma Abedin, Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad, model Loli Bahia, Fai Khadra, and Georgina Rodriguez.
The evening was described as intimate and warm, a high-glamour warm-up framed around the Bezoses’ now-central position in the fashion and celebrity ecosystem they have, over the past few years, purchased their way into quite deliberately.
The people who will not be there
Zendaya is sitting out. After back-to-back press runs for The Drama and Euphoria Season 3, she opted for a break, which tracks with her broader pattern of curating her public presence carefully. It is worth noting, in that context, her reported distance from co-star Sydney Sweeney amid the latter’s rumored pro-Trump leanings and increasingly polarizing public image, Zendaya has been consistent about what rooms she chooses to be in, and this year the Met Gala is not one of them.
Her longtime stylist and collaborator Law Roach will attend solo, which is one of the rare instances where the Met Gala centers on him as a figure in his own right rather than as the architect behind a client’s look. Those who were paying attention during Paris Couture will have clocked that Roach has been stepping into a new kind of visibility, including his work styling Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a collaboration that has placed him squarely inside the Bezos orbit and made his presence at tonight’s gala feel less like a plus-one situation and more like a seat at the table he has been working toward. Tonight he will wear a custom soft-structured three-piece white suit by Ami Paris, hand-painted with an abstract “embrace” motif by Gabonese-Ghanaian artist Naïla Opiangah. The most discussed Law Roach look of the evening will be the one he is wearing himself.
Another pointed absence is Meryl Streep. Word is she was invited to co-chair again this year, and her well-documented friendship with Wintour certainly suggests the offer was made and genuinely meant. Amy Odell and a significant portion of the online conversation believe Streep passed specifically because of Bezos’ involvement. She was reportedly set to co-chair years ago before backing out.
Lauren Santo Domingo, a Met Gala fixture and someone who was present at the Bezos wedding, is also skipping this year, though she was characteristically careful to stay out of the camera’s way about it. Nicolas Ghesquière and JW Anderson are sitting this one out as well. Lady Gaga’s name has also yet to appear on any confirmed list, which at her profile level is conspicuous rather than incidental. Nicki Minaj, for her part, is rumored to not have received an invitation at all, the newest name, reportedly, on Wintour’s unofficial list.
Katy Perry added last-minute drama when she polled her followers on X asking “Should I go to #TheMet?” amid the ongoing boycott pressure and backlash against the Bezos sponsorship. This comes just weeks after she flew to space with Lauren Sánchez on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket as part of the high-profile all-women crew flight in mid-April.
Notable Debuts
Among the notable first-timers expected on the carpet tonight are Heated Rivalry breakout stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. The duo, who have seen an explosive rise in popularity over the past six months, have been spotted in New York this weekend, fueling strong speculation that they will make their Met Gala debuts with Connor most likely in Saint Laurent and Hudson in Balenciaga.
Prediction Markets Are Cashing In on All the Uncertainty
All this speculation , who’s coming, who’s skipping, and what everyone will wear, has created a perfect storm for prediction markets. These platforms let people bet real money on the outcomes of future events, with current prices reflecting the crowd’s best guess at probabilities.
This year, traders on Polymarket and Kalshi have already wagered well over $750,000 across Met Gala contracts. On Polymarket, the market “Will Lady Gaga attend the Met Gala?” sits at just 24% Yes (nearly $98,000 traded). On Kalshi, traders are pricing an 82% chance that Kim Kardashian will wear Gucci tonight.
An anticipated look
Tom Ford is reportedly attending tonight, which is itself a headline given how rarely he has been seen publicly since selling his brand. He is said to be seated with Emily Blunt, who will be wearing an unreleased Ford runway sample, not anything by Haider Ackermann, who now runs the house, meaning the look exists in a kind of fashion limbo, a garment from a chapter that is already closed. For anyone who finds the current conversation about creative succession and brand legacy more interesting than another Saint Laurent moment on the carpet, that is probably the look to watch. Also ironically Blunt plays a seemingly Lauren Sanchez Bezos inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada 2.
What’s happening with the money
In a piece published May 1st, New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman reported something that had not been publicly disclosed before: the Costume Institute has been quietly setting aside a portion of Met Gala proceeds since 2016 to build what curator in charge Andrew Bolton described to the Times as a “quasi-endowment.” According to the reporting, that savings strategy could give the department enough of a financial cushion by 2028, and certainly by 2030, to cover its basic operations independently, regardless of what happens with the gala or the broader museum budget.
This year’s gala appears to have smashed records once again. Rachel Tashjian of CNN Style reported that the event raised a record $42 million, up from the previous record of $31 million in 2025.
In the same piece, Met Director and CEO Max Hollein directly addressed the controversy around the Bezos sponsorship, telling Tashjian:
“This is not a show for Amazon. This is not a show about Lauren Sánchez’s dresses. It’s important to understand that what our donors are supporting is the Met’s program, the ideas of our curators, and the integrity of the institution.”
This matters because the Costume Institute is the only department at the Met required to fund its own operations, and it has been almost entirely dependent on the annual benefit to do so since the gala began in 1948. Over the past decade alone, the event has raised $166.5 million for the department. Bolton told the Times he has long wanted the Costume Institute to be less reliant on the fundraiser because “the shine of the event dwarfs everything” — a remarkably candid admission from the person whose work is most consistently overshadowed by the spectacle surrounding it. The 2020 pandemic cancellation, he said, served as “a real wake-up call.”
The timing of this disclosure, arriving the week of a gala that has become unusually contested and unusually corporate in its public identity, is its own kind of editorial statement.
I’ll be penning a live reaction piece for Everything Is Political with my full thoughts. Stay tuned.
Sadly, the techbros that “have never worn collars voluntarily” have infiltrated so much more than the front row at fashion week: Sundance, Burning Man, Coachella, Art Basel are now all teeming with nerds who want acquire a semblance of being ‘cool’, when for most of their life they were never remotely interested in art, music, film nor fashion. At least robber barons like Carnegie and Frick left something useful behind. Contributing $10 M (a pittance for Bezos, especially considering he spent $70 on the Melania video hagiography) does not make you a Medici.