Photograph by Matthew Johnson
The 2026 Met Gala–the theme of which was “Fashion Is Art”–started long before the carpet for Lauren Sánchez Bezos, former TV anchor and wife of the world’s second richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. In full society doyenne drag, addressing industry people at the Met Gala press conference on the morning of May 4, Sánchez Bezos spoke about the Bezos Earth Fund’s commitment to “reimagining what fabric can be.” Sustainable silk grown in labs. Cotton rebuilt from the ground up. Because “the designers in this exhibit and the ones coming up after,” she said, “deserve an industry as forward-thinking as they are.”
I rolled my eyes as I thought about how Amazon is currently being sued in multiple countries over warehouse working conditions. Meanwhile, Sánchez Bezos stood in a room full of people whose industry runs on some of the most underpaid labor on earth, talking about sustainable fabric innovation.
Across town, hundreds of workers gathered in the Meatpacking District for the Ball Without Billionaires, a counter-event organized by Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Strategic Organizing Center, and the Amazon Labor Union, casting current and former workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, the Washington Post, Starbucks, and Uber as models, dressed by emerging immigrant and BIPOC designers andco-hosted by fashion editor and stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. Their counter-theme to “Fashion Is Art” was “Labor Is Art.” SEIU president April Verrett said from the stage: “Every year, the Met Gala tells a story about who matters, who gets seen, who gets celebrated. This year, we decided to center us.”
But this is the cruel irony of arguably the most contentious Met Gala in history—in which Bezos and Sánchez served as honorary co-chairs and lead sponsors (to the tune of 10 million dollars). This is the kind of cultural legitimacy that you can apparently just wire transfer now. And while some people brought the looks, one word kept jumping out at me as I looked at the world’s biggest stars on fashion’s biggest night: “emptiness.”
The night of glamour marched on as planned, with a few highlights in tow. Emma Chamberlain, the YouTuber-turned-fashion-fixture, wore a custom, hand-painted Mugler gown and continues to be the one person who actually seems to think about what she’s wearing and why. I enjoyed seeing fashion illustrator Richard Haines sketching guests as they walked the carpet. Connor Storrie, one half of the Heated Rivalry duo, attended his first Met Gala wearing a sultry suit from Saint Laurent, looking fabulous, his fans outside the Carlyle screaming on the livestream that woke my cat up. Sarah Paulson wore look 27 from Matières Fécales’ Fall 2026 collection, an indie label whose entire creative ethos is built around caricaturing and mocking ultra-wealth, a money mask rendering her blind to everything around her. The most committed political look of the night, worn on a carpet underwritten by the precise demographic the label exists to mock.
Fashion eating itself in real time and somehow still tasting good is a hard thing to pull off.
Photograph by Matthew Johnson
As for the underwhelming and disappointing: Sánchez Bezos arrived in a navy Schiaparelli dress and paid tribute to “Madame X,” the 1884 John Singer Sargent portrait of American socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, in a moment of self-awareness that made her all the more interesting and infuriating. “Madame X” exists because both Sargent andGautreau, who married into French wealth and wanted Paris society to take her seriously, believed the portrait would make them famous. It was pulled from public view for being too sexual, too nakedly ambitious, too transparent about wanting legitimacy from a society that had already decided the subject didn’t deserve it. It was a statement that felt almost too heavy-handed last night, all whilst protesters were outside demanding Sánchez Bezos’ husband pay his workers. (Claire Foy wore the same reference better, for the record.) Lala Anthony, a longtime friend of Kim Kardashian, arrived reheating Kim Kardashian’s old Mugler moment. Alexander Wang, the New York fashion designer who has faced serious, extensively documented sexual assault allegations from multiple accusers since 2021, made an appearance with model Irina Shayk. Anna Wintour was, apparently, unbothered; for Bezos isn’t the only one receiving a co-signed image rehabilitation tonight.
Crazy how some people never get invited back for far less.
Just as I was getting bored, a man sprinted through traffic, vaulted the barriers, and barreled toward the Met entrance with a protest sign clutched in his hands. NYPD officers tackled him hard to the ground, which couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from Tom Ford and Julianne Moore. His sign read: “Amazon refuses to negotiate with its union, and Amazon invests in genocide.” The NYPD later called him “a disorderly male.” That man was Chris Smalls.
In 2022, the former Amazon warehouse worker, fired in 2020 for supposedly violating social distancing while actually organizing a COVID safety walkout, led the grassroots campaign that established the first recognized union at an Amazon facility. It was one of the biggest labor victories in recent American history, won without major union backing, through pure worker grit and determination. Four years later, Amazon still refuses to negotiate a contract with them. Monday night, while Jeff Bezos was inside swilling champagne and posing for his single photo of the evening, Smalls was face-down on the pavement outside.
For the most-anticipated look of the evening, Beyoncé, singer, cultural institution, and co-chair of this year’s gala, arrived in custom Olivier Rousteing, a skeletal, bejeweled see-through couture gown referencing “Visitor” by Louisiana Creole artist Caroline Durieux, a painting of a skeletal woman in a long transparent dress arriving at a door. She wore the Queen of Kalahari by Chopard, a 342-carat diamond valued at 50 million dollars, reportedly the most expensive piece of jewelry ever worn on a red carpet. I stopped trying to work out the internal logic of Beyoncé’s politics a long time ago. She is political when it suits her and quiet when that suits her too, and she has the cultural capital to make both moves cost her nothing. Everyone ties themselves in knots trying to make Beyoncé’s politics consistent. It never quite does, and I’ve made an uneasy peace with that.
The Skims nipple bra moment on Kendall Jenner, because the KarJenners never stop marketing, not even on the Met Gala carpet (especially not on the Met Gala carpet), felt like the most honest encapsulation of the night anyway. A marketing opportunity with a dress code.
A very important detail of the exhibit associated with the evening’s festivities, “Costume Art,” that few people are talking about is that Palestinian artist Samar Hejazi designed reflective mannequins for the exhibit, pieces where your own reflection replaces the face as you approach.
“Rather than presenting a fixed image,” she told YUNG magazine in an interview, “the mannequins become sites of exchange. The viewer becomes part of what they’re seeing.” Lowkey, that was the most quietly political thing inside the building all night.
In the end, the Ball Without Billionaires unfolded as planned, Chris Smalls was tackled by police just steps from the entrance while Bezos remained safely inside via private side door, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani chose to highlight the stories of New York garment workers and delivery drivers rather than attend. Sánchez Bezos navigated the carpet largely on her own, the external protests and counter-programming drew more sustained attention than most of the looks inside, and the official theme felt increasingly hollow against the sharper reality playing out on the street.
What lingered with me after the Vogue livestream ended and Rihanna & A$AP Rocky closed the carpet was the sense that labor had once again been asked to perform its artistry elsewhere, whether that be on picket lines, in union halls, and in rushed interventions—while the institution it sustains threw its annual celebration underwritten by one of its most powerful adversaries.
The Bezoses did what they set out to do and secured their cultural moment for ten million dollars. The rest of the evening simply confirmed the distance between the two worlds the event tried, and failed, to bridge. They just stared at their own image all night long.