Is the Met Gala still cool? 

At one point in time — a time before influencing was even a job — an invite conferred elite taste-making status. Those who went were trendsetters and influencers. Take 2003, for instance: The Devil Wears Prada had just come out as a book. Tom Ford co-chaired alongside Anna Wintour and Nicole Kidman. The theme was Goddess: The Classical Mode. The proletariat who weren’t invited could spend $250 for an after-party ticket to hear Ashanti perform in the Great Hall after dinner. Individual seats at said dinner were $3,500, causing then-New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn to call it “certainly the most expensive shindig in town.”

It was Anna’s fifth time chairing the gala, and she joked about her white Dior gown coming with “two horns and a tail.” At the most glamorous table sat Ford, Kidman, Adrien Brody (fresh off his Oscar win for The Pianist), and Diana Ross. The sponsor was Gucci, where Ford was at his peak in terms of cultural influence. The centerpieces required 4,000 peonies. The taste level was the story. The taste level was the point.

Anna has now chaired nearly 30 galas (her first was in 1995). Individual tickets for 2026 cost $100,000, up from $75,000 last year. Table prices, at $350,000, are unchanged from 2025. Now, however, the lead sponsor is not a fashion brand, but a couple: Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos, whose primary aesthetic is tackiness and whose primary vibe is tackiness’s favorite bedfellow, obliviousness.

In her quest to raise more money each year, Anna has made the ticket prices so expensive that just about nobody can afford them except tech companies, which have not only run roughshod over society writ large but are also run by some of the most loathed people in the world. Two-thirds of America view recent front-row Prada guest Mark Zuckerberg unfavorably, according to a 2025 Pew poll, putting his overall favorability rating about on par with Congress.

This influx of tech money at the gala has eroded its cool factor. Yet the tech people who attend are still rewarded with valuable PR and business opportunities. What used to be a closed-door networking event for fashion industry people, society donors, and entertainers, surrounded by décor so elegant the masses could only dream to lay eyes on it, is now a big-box clout store for the richest people on the planet.

And the tech set are now able to buy cultural cache at the Met Gala for what amount to unbelievably low prices. In 2025, the event raised $31 million which, proportionally, means about as much to Jeff Bezos as $10 does to a median American household with an $80,000 income. (His fortune is estimated at upward of $270 billion — making him so rich that even if he covered the party’s $6 million price tag, it’d be equivalent to that median household spending just $2.) This year’s table buyers, meanwhile, include a litany of tech companies desperate for fashion-world acceptance, including OpenAI, Meta, and Snapchat. Their executives know there’s serious money to be made in being seen as a platform for the kind of fashion influence that, 25 years ago, couldn’t be bought and sold at the Met Gala or anywhere else. All of these businesses need female adoption. They benefit from being seen as worthy receptacles of high fashion marketing dollars, and their executives benefit, PR-wise, because their donations will attract high-profile defenders who will be eager to point out how much money they put toward a good cause.

If anyone gazes out over the dinner on Monday, May 4 and thinks, as Horyn did of Ford in 2003, that Bezos’ influence is evident in the room, it’s hard to imagine them doing so with breathless admiration. Sánchez’s previously viral party planning pursuits include her own pre-wedding foam spectacle and Kris Jenner’s 007-themed 70th birthday, featuring poker chips with her face on them and more red velvet than all the casinos in Vegas combined. (One planner estimated the cost of that event at $3.9 to $6.5 million — in other words, roughly the same price tag as the Met Gala.) 

Anna’s pursuit of tech money makes me wonder if the fashion industry feels it has adequate funds to sponsor the event at her going rates. (The Gala is the primary fundraiser for the Costume Institute, which does not benefit from the Met Museum’s endowment and must raise its own money.) Meta’s first quarter earnings are expected at more than $55 billion in revenue; Gucci’s were $1.5 billion. In 2025, Hermès — the most coveted luxury brand on earth with a market cap of $194 billion — did $19 billion in revenue. In that same period, Nvidia grew by $68 billion. Two-time gala attendee Elon Musk’s net worth is that of three Hermèses.

The tech world's march toward Met Gala domination has been long. Amazon was one of the first tech companies to sponsor the gala in 2012, opening the exhibition Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations. Yahoo came in in 2016, with Apple following in 2017. Instagram took on the 2021 and 2022 galas, and TikTok threw a reported “high seven figures” at it in 2024, the same year OpenAI’s technology was integrated into the exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. In 2022, Michael Lewis reported that Anna sought money from billionaire FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who had no idea who she was. "He is the worst-dressed person in America. He is the worst-dressed billionaire in the history of billionaires," Lewis pointed out. (SBF is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud.)

Along with tech money came the gala’s general outlandishness. People like Ford lament that it’s become a costume party. Katy Perry dressed as a chandelier and hamburger in one night (Camp, 2019), which is the kind of stuff you wear when you’re playing to algorithmic impressions instead of an internalized sense of personal style. Opulence and clickbait long ago became shorthand for taste. But now that the creative class are being edged out of the room, they’ve just become shorthand for wealth. 

This year it would be entirely unsurprising to see Sam Altman, who got kicked out of the Ritz over his “sport shoes”, or Mark Zuckerberg, whose famously bland wardrobe mainly consists of oversize T-shirts and hoodies, ascend the Met Gala steps to shake the Bezos’ hands. They may not be cool, but if the party is this expensive, who else has the money to buy a seat?

It used to be the society people who felt shunned by Anna Wintour, who felt like they’d been booted from the room in favor of entertainers. Has the event become so expensive and tech billionaires so wealthy that the fashion brands the evening is meant to support have gotten an inadvertent boot for people who can stage a Met Gala at one of their homes for Kris Jenner’s birthday party? 

Protests of Bezos’s involvement are unfolding on the streets of New York. But the danger for organizers is that, if the event continues down this path, filling up with people who are not cool, it will eventually become obviously uncool — at which point it won’t have anything to sell to people who cavalierly put out caviar bars at their houses like they’re coolers full of LaCroix. 

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