The new Met Gala co-chairs have been announced, and it’s a high-powered quartet: Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Nicole Kidman will join Vogue’s Anna Wintour in hosting the star-packed event next May.
Williams, who has never hosted before, takes the role seven years after her younger sister and fellow tennis champion, Serena, was co-chair. Beyoncé was honorary chair in 2013, and Kidman co-chaired in 2003 and 2005. Wintour, of course, oversees the annual event, a fundraiser that last year brought a record $31 million to the coffers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
The museum on Wednesday also announced a gala host committee, chaired by designer Anthony Vaccarello and filmmaker Zoë Kravitz, and including musicians Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, LISA, Sam Smith and Yseult; dancer Misty Copeland; actors Teyana Taylor, Elizabeth Debicki, Gwendoline Christie and Lena Dunham; basketball player A’ja Wilson; models Alex Consani, Paloma Elsesser and Lauren Wasser; Vogue editor Chloe Malle; and artist Anna Weyant.
Yet to be announced: the dress code for the May 4 gala. But it will dovetail with the theme of “Costume Art,” announced last month as the institute’s next spring exhibit.
The exhibit aims to celebrate “the dressed body” as it appears in art through the centuries. It will do that by pairing garments with objects from across the museum to show how fashion has long been intertwined with different art forms.
“It’s a show that can really live in fascinating ways at the museum and can pull from all different areas of our collection — paintings, sculpture, drawings,” the museum’s CEO and director, Max Hollein, said in an interview last month.
The show, overseen as always by the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, Andrew Bolton, will be organized thematically by different body types. It will include the “Naked Body” and the “Classical Body,” for example, but also less traditional themes like the “Pregnant Body” and the “Aging Body.”
The new exhibit will also have a splashy new home. “Costume Art” will inaugurate new gallery space occupying some 12,000 square feet (1,115 square meters), right off the museum’s Great Hall — giving fashion a prominent space in the museum and also helping to control congestion at the heavily attended exhibits. The new Conde M. Nast galleries — created from what was formerly the museum’s retail store — will house not only all spring Costume Institute exhibits, but other shows from different parts of the museum.
Bolton has said the gallery space “will mark a pivotal moment for the department, one that acknowledges the critical role fashion plays not only within art history but also within contemporary culture.”
Venus Williams returned to competition in July at age 45 after nearly 1 1/2 years away from the tour, though she had never retired. She became the oldest player to play singles at the U.S. Open since 1981. Serena Williams, meanwhile, recently threw cold water on the idea that she might be preparing to return to tennis.
“Costume Art” opens to the public May 10 and runs until Jan. 10, 2027.