Smells Like Fete: The Anticlimactic Glamour of the 2026 Met Gala
By Alexander Jovanovich
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SAD, STRANGE, DULL, EXPENSIVE—these are the words that immediately came to mind when I first walked through an Erewhon. They also describe the day that I spent with my dad in hospice almost sixteen years ago, holding his dirty and frail hand as I worried about how my soon-to-be-widowed mother would pay for his funeral and medical expenses. And finally, they summarize what I felt about my inaugural press turn at the 2026 Met Gala in New York, the theme of which was “Fashion Is Art.”
This year’s event was staged to celebrate the “Costume Art” exhibition in the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, located in the museum’s former gift shop. The presentation, which “[examines] the centrality of the dressed body,” per the press release, features sundry juxtapositions of garments and artworks culled from the Met’s magnificent stores. Both the show and the party were largely subsidized by American oligarch Jeff Bezos and his consigliere/wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, to the tune of about $10 million: tax-deductible jelly-jar change to a couple who spent $500 million on a 417-foot “superyacht” that costs roughly $25 million annually to maintain.
Within a temporary corridor built along Fifth Avenue, where all the stars would line up to get inside the soiree, I witnessed a menagerie of grifters and A-listers waft in. Among them were Ms. Sánchez Bezos (whose surgically enhanced rictus eerily resembles Amazon’s smugly smirking arrow logo) and her fellow Blue Origin bobbleheads Katy Perry and Gayle King; the gala’s longtime master of ceremonies, Anna Wintour; newly right-wing Google cofounder and Little Saint James (aka Epstein Island) visitor Sergey Brin; various noxious strains of Kardashian/Jenner; and a murder of Murdochs. I was stationed with a few other press folks inside a metal-and-plywood corral zhuzhed up with chopped greenery inelegantly stapled to its exterior. We were just a few skips away from the grand steps, where all the gala’s invitees dramatically ascended to the museum’s entrance as cameras flashed and battalions of fuzzy microphones rudely penetrated their personal space.
I was not given an all-access press pass, so I spent most of my time confined to the bushy stable. But I had the opportunity to talk to some of the invitees as they waited in line. One blonde model offered her opinion on the gala’s theme: “Well, fashion is art because fashion IS art. You know?” (In fact, several attendees offered more or less identical versions of this assessment.) I also overheard a socialite discuss the inspiration for her outfit, which her stylist put together: “There’s a snake on my purse, and my dress has feathers, and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, animals!’” Someone then asked her husband’s thoughts on the gala: “It’s such a ridiculous experience that has nothing to do with the world. But still, it’s fun!”
A lot of people were gathered outside the museum, either loudly protesting the event or wildly cheering on the armies of celebrities exiting their limos and luxury SUVs. The din was often unsettling. It made me imagine what the hordes assembled around the guillotine during the Reign of Terror must’ve sounded like: screams of elation, screams of devastation.
It was difficult to take in such an overwhelming glut of conspicuous consumption. I felt like a handmaid to oligarchic totalitarianism by being in close proximity, however briefly, to Bezos and Brin. I thought of my impoverished mother, her hardscrabble life, and the horror she would have expressed at seeing self-indulgent me participate in all this excess. I felt frivolous for my yearslong love of costume, couture, and costly trinkets, and embarrassed for being such a stereotypical fag. All of my guilt and insecurities about growing up poor and working in the highbrow realm of culture came rushing back. But no one I spoke to seemed to share my misgivings or angst. Were they genuinely enjoying themselves, or just afraid of Wintour’s Gala Stasi getting a whiff of any dissatisfaction?
Either way, the tension of being there and trying hard not to make any clumsy missteps before the beau monde was palpable—there was no shortage of forced smiles and overweeningly polite greetings. After all, doing one’s best to appear friendly aids in lubricating the many whirring gears of a logistical nightmare like the gala. The fashion writers, construction crews, janitorial teams, photographers, videographers, and other people employed to make this soiree go off successfully are expected to be amiable, unobtrusive, compliant. They should disappear into the background, like helpful little ghosts.
Appropriately enough, death seemed to be one of the gala’s sub-themes. While this event has never been short on goth aesthetics—kohled eyes, corpse-white skin, and miles of black lace are staples—the preponderance of dark glamour carried a queasy, consumptive quality. Bad Bunny was made up to resemble a fragile éminence grise. His synthetically aged and liver-spotted visage paired nicely with his affectedly tremulous gait and handsome walking stick. Model Anok Yai, maquillaged with coppery face paint and trompe l’oeil tears, came ravishingly shrouded in Balenciaga as the Holy Virgin. “I [felt] like being the Black Madonna in a Trump world,” she told Vogue.com. Heidi Klum was upholstered in a rubbery, spongy costume that made her look like a marble statue from a fifteenth-century graveyard, while our secular songstress Madonna—who was apparently dressed as a spectral figure from Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony—brought a funeral cortege with her. She walked down the Fifth Avenue corridor like a regal Italian widow as bleak music played from a source utterly invisible to my eyes. Seven wan young women in raggedy slip-dresses trailed behind the pop star, holding her absurdly long train and, quite likely, a grudge.
This deathliness was accentuated by an Ensorian parade of Mar-a-Lago faces being squired around by teams of youthful, bright-eyed ushers. They carried the invitees’ sundry accessories and, in certain instances, the invitees themselves, languishing in line and waiting for their turn to go up the museum’s granite steps. By 9:30 PM, eight hours after arriving to the Met, I noticed something in the air. It wasn’t joy or a lingering olfactory cavalcade of expensive perfumes and body powders, but the faint yet unmistakably acrid smell of hungry stomachs, hundreds of which must’ve passed through that corridor. What a funny irony—to be swathed in recherché jewelry and clothes that probably cost more than most middle-class homes, dying for a sandwich. By the time I left, weary and weirded out, I was dying for one, too.
Alex Jovanovich is an artist and senior editor of Artforum.
This article was originally published by Artforum.