You're tearing me apart, Met Gala!

Chat with me on May 4 anyway.

Context for the uninitiated.

That’s me in the image above. I’ve thrown myself down the Met Gala steps in exasperation. Here’s why:

The Met’s Costume Institute (which the May 4 Met Gala is a fundraiser for) has an exhibition this spring: “Costume Art.” It examines “the centrality of the dressed body.”

As the proprietor of this here body-focused newsletter, that perked me right up. The word “body” appears no less than 15 times in that announcement. If last year’s Gala was recognized as the Black Style gala, if 2019 was the Camp gala, if 2018 was the Catholic gala, then 2026 is the BODY gala, baby! Right?

According to The Met, the exhibition is fully body-focused. It offers:

“… pairings that not only illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body but also the complex interplay between artistic representations of the body and fashion as an embodied artform.”

There will also be mannequins with body types shown in works throughout the Met, like the pregnant body, the fat body, and the aging body; the mannequins have mirrored faces so the viewer can “see themselves” in these bodies. Compelling. Timely.

But then came the Met Gala’s “dress code,” which is often called the “theme,” even though it’s not enforced and half the guests flub it anyway¹:

“Fashion is Art.”

I mean, OK. It sure can be. But given that “art” appears in both the exhibition name and the dress code, is 2026 going to be the … Art gala? Or, given the “fashion”/“costume” references, the … Clothes gala?

Why, if the exhibition is focused on the “connection between our bodies and our clothes,” is the word “body” not front and center? If the exhibition is about the art of fashion/costuming ON THE BODY — what are we doing here, people?

Grace Cook has an idea:

Well, no lies detected. And as Vanessa Friedman wrote in The New York Times earlier this year: “Fashion has begun exaggerating, or distorting, the female form like never before.” From her article:

“Every single person I know is sort of 10 to 20 percent of what they were six months ago,” said Mr. [Daniel] Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli. “People are going through a transformation.”

Mr. Roseberry said that though he had tried to break the cycle and put out “a totally corset-free collection, what the clients want is not that at all.” What they want, he said, is more and more of the manufactured silhouette.

While I’m clearly not a fashion expert or historian, I’m a bit wary of the claim that fashion is doing this “like never before” — corsets, panniers, and the like were shaping the physiques of more women throughout history than the number of them wearing body-modification haute couture right now, I’d wager — but it’s true that recent years have seen an uptick in “weird body fashion” among the celebrity set. I’ve written about how I think that could be a net-good thing:

Swole, slutty, surreal: A political imperative?

Although the Met Gala’s code/theme has been befuddling — 2024’s exhibition was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” and the dress code was “The Garden of Time”; this garbled mismatch demands jail time for its begetter — when it’s clearer, the results are spectacular.

The 2018 exhibition was “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and the dress code was “Sunday Best.” Easy: Crosses, vestments, Joan of Arc. The 2015 exhibition was “China: Through The Looking Glass,”² and Rihanna wore Chinese designer Guo Pei’s breathtaking omelette dress to great fanfare. It all made sense.

This year, you might expect the dress code to encourage people to show up wearing painting frames — Tracee Ellis Ross already did that! I guarantee we’re going to see a bunch of snoozy, vaguely “arty” looks: Lichtenstein makeup circa 2013. Birth of Venus clamshellery. Some couple will do a Klimt thing³. Cool, but the exhibition isn’t an AP Art History retrospective, now is it?

I have to wonder if no one at The Met could figure out how to make it The Body Gala without having everyone turn up in tired naked dresses. But given all the swole, slutty, surreal fashion going on right now — and given how ripe this moment is for commentary on how central, controversial, and unnerving (but still, as ever, wondrous) the human body can be — it’s astonishing that they didn’t lean all the way into it.

Why not Anatomy of Style⁴? The Human Canvas? Make it creepy, go with CORPUS, and watch Gaga show up in a hat made from a ribcage. Something! I am sure the brain trust at The Met could have come up with language that reads more highbrow and artistic, less body-ody-ody in a bandage dress. Alas.

Maybe I’m not giving anyone enough credit. I hope there are looks like the ones the the Dazed editors predicted. Let’s see, shall we?

Join me for a chat and live watch of the Met Gala red carpet on Monday, May 4, at 6 p.m. EST.

Here’s how to watch:

• Vogue Livestream: Available on Vogue.com, YouTube, and TikTok starting at 6 p.m. ET.

• E! News: Live coverage and special, “Live From E!: Met Gala 2026,” airs from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET on cable, Peacock, and E! Online.

You’ll get an email when I start the chat, and you can join from your Substack app or your desktop browser. I hope I see you there!

1. Here’s another thing I would trap you in an interminable conversation about, if I had my druthers: If you are a rich, famous, Met Gala-invitee with unlimited access to the wide world of fashion and styling, and you do not take the opportunity to not only dress to code, but also to fully bring it with your look — you are a boring, basic, self-serious snob and you don’t deserve to attend.

2. It seems that sometimes the title of the exhibition is also the dress code — or there just isn’t a dress code? — but sometimes, they’re different. Needless confusion. Deeply upsetting. Down the stairs I go once more…

3. If it’s Rih and A$AP, sigh, I guess…

4. Also a book.