THE COSTUME INSTITUTE BENEFIT

The Costume Institute Benefit is a dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the first Monday in May. It opens the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, and it is the department’s main source of money for the year: exhibitions, books, acquisitions and the cost of running the place.

Nobody calls it that. It is the Met Gala: some four hundred guests, one staircase, and a broadcast of every step.

The Party of the Year

The Costume Institute began in 1937 as the Museum of Costume Art, founded by a small circle from the arts and the theatre, and joined the Metropolitan in 1946.

Two years later Eleanor Lambert, the publicist who had invented New York’s fashion week, gave it a benefit: a midnight supper at fifty dollars a ticket, which she called the Party of the Year.

Diana Vreeland made it something else. Vogue let her go in 1971, and within a year the Metropolitan had taken her on, at nearly seventy, to make exhibitions of dress. The first was Balenciaga, in 1973. The benefit that opened each one became a fête for the social and art worlds, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis co-chaired it.

Anna Wintour took it over in 1995 and has run it almost every year since. In 2026 it raised forty-two million dollars, a record for the evening.

The List

A ticket has a price, and everyone knows it. It still cannot be bought.

Places are given. Much of the room is there as the guest of a house, which takes a table, fills it with the people it has dressed, and pays for them. The chair oversees the list.

The theme is set by the exhibition, and the dress code by the theme. The carpet over the Museum’s steps changes with it: pink one year, a garden another, dark blue and scattered with stars a third. Each guest climbs it past a bank of photographers, and the climb is the part of the evening that is public.

Inside, the rules are short. No telephones. No smoking. Nobody under eighteen. No onion, garlic or chives on the menu.

What to Know

The steps are closed for the evening. The public watches from across Fifth Avenue, and everyone else watches Vogue’s broadcast.

The exhibition opens to the public within the week. Since 2026 the spring exhibition has had new galleries of its own, beside the Great Hall. The Anna Wintour Costume Center keeps the autumn.

The dress code is the theme. A member who dresses themselves goes in white tie. A member dressed by a house goes in what the house has made.

The mistake is to watch the staircase and never see the exhibition. The evening lasts a night. The exhibition runs for months, and it is what the evening paid for.

The gala opens New York’s May. Frieze, TEFAF and the spring sales follow in the weeks after it.

The Court

The Costume Institute Benefit is not the Court’s own, and the Court will not pretend it can put a member on those steps. The places belong to the chair and to the houses that take tables.

For a member who is asked, the Court arranges what surrounds the evening: where to stay, the car to Fifth Avenue, and the table afterward. For every member, it arranges the exhibition, seen properly once it opens, and the fairs and sales that follow it through May.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.