The Met Gala is all about excess. It is the most ostentatious night in fashion, when celebs flock to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in preposterous outfits, and tickets cost $75,000.
The evening raises a shedload of cash for the Met’s Costume Institute – $31 million this year, according to the New York Times – but the cost of putting it on is also in the millions. Sponsors with deep pockets are therefore a requisite.
The Met Gala typically has a fashion house as its lead sponsor – this year’s was Louis Vuitton – but Anna Wintour, who has hosted the extravaganza since 1995, is no stranger to corporate cash. The gala was funded by TikTok in 2024, and Instagram in 2022.
This week it was announced that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos will be the lead sponsors of the Met Gala for 2026.
The theme will be “Costume Art”. The Sánchez-Bezoses have also sponsored the accompanying exhibition of the same name, which will focus on “the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear,” according to Met curator Andrew Bolton.
This is not Jeff Bezos’s first turn at the Met Gala. He was an honorary chair of the Gala in 2012, which was sponsored by Amazon. He attended in a Tom Ford tuxedo with his then-wife, Mackenzie. He also went to the Camp-themed 2019 gala and was pictured joshing with Jared Leto and the Kardashian-Jenners on the red carpet.
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In 2024, Bezos and Sánchez made their Met Gala debut as a couple. They did not attend this year’s event, which was six weeks before their lavish wedding in Venice.
Sánchez is not Wintour’s typical sartorial or political type: she and Bezos attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, where she turned the heads of tech bros in a suit which displayed a white lacy bra. Wintour was a supporter of Biden and favours a high neckline. But according to Wintour, the couple are a good fit for the 2026 gala. “Lauren loves costumes,” she told the New York Times. “She loves fashion.” Wintour and Bezos have been friends for years, spotted lunching together in New York and set next to each other at fashion shows.
While Wintour did not go to the wedding, Vogue made Sánchez its digital cover star in June. Chloe Malle, who replaced Wintour in September as American Vogue’s editor, travelled to Italy to interview Sánchez about her dress and the plans for the nuptials. The interview features such pearls as “how her recent flight to space shaped her bridal look”. Sánchez also described her now-husband as “actually more artistic than people think.”
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The couple’s sponsorship of the Met Gala is part of their foray into the fashion world. They attended various New York Fashion Week parties in September and sat on the front row at Chanel’s show in Paris.
Outfit preparations for the first Monday in May have no doubt begun, but Bezos can rest easy. According to his wife, “He just looks good in everything he wears.”
