On the first Monday each May, New York hosts Hollywood’s brightest stars and fashion’s famed designers for a night in aid of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. It’s also a night to be seen on the most-watched red carpet, not simply for visibility, but for cultural validation. Attendance at the Met Gala has long functioned as an unofficial ranking system, signalling who sits within fashion’s upper tier of taste and relevance, while also delivering some of the highest-performing social media moments of the year for those invited.
Historically, luxury houses would buy tables and use them to host and dress actors, musicians and emerging muses – a move championed by Anna Wintour, who understood the power of celebrity and virality as early as the 2000s. While it’s been critiqued as an increasingly out-of-touch display of extreme wealth by many in recent years, even at its most indulgent, the Met Gala could justify its excess: it was funding the preservation of fashion history at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.
This year, the announcement of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and wife Lauren Sánchez as the Gala’s sponsors has punctured the illusion of status the Met Gala trades on, and has dragged the industry’s real power dynamics out into the open. What once positioned itself as a celebration of taste is now shown starkly as a marketplace for influence, where access is no longer secured through capital rather than earned through cultural contribution. Bezos and Sánchez are not arbiters of taste. They are not patrons of craft, nor contributors to fashion’s cultural lineage. What they represent is capital at a scale that doesn’t need to develop taste; turns out, you can buy your way in, so long as you’re entering from the top.
Bezos and Sánchez are not arbiters of taste. They are not patrons of craft, nor contributors to fashion’s cultural lineage. What they represent is capital at a scale that doesn’t need to develop taste; turns out, you can buy your way in, so long as you’re entering from the top.
Despite their attempts to weasel their way into fashion’s upper echelons – from being personally ushered through couture week by Anna Wintour to persistent whispers of Bezos’ secret investments across media and luxury – much of the industry has been reluctant to fully embrace the duo, and with an abundance of compelling justifications. Bezos’ wealth is inseparable from the conditions that built it: Amazon’s long-documented labour practices, from workers forced into punishing productivity targets to reports of employees urinating in bottles to meet quotas, sit in direct opposition to the artisanal labour and human craft the Gala claims to celebrate. His political positioning (including proximity to Donald Trump and contracts linked to ICE infrastructure) only adds to that contradiction. Fashion is not unaware of this; it is simply choosing to look past it. In doing so, it exposes a willingness to absorb almost any figure, no matter how misaligned with its stated values, so long as their purse strings are large enough.
This weekend, I went to the cinema to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2, excited to see what looks made the cut and where its beloved characters are now. In particular, I was keen to see how the film tackled this precarious period for print publications, lifestyle titles especially, and how the gang were priming Runway for a new era (Spoilers ahead; you’ve been warned!). Instead, I witnessed a two-hour advert disguised as a sequel, where nostalgia is used to conceal character development, and sweeping statements about the state of journalism avoid pointing fingers at any of the film franchise’s beneficiaries. It gestures towards critique, but ultimately it primarily functions as a fully integrated multi-brand sponsored campaign, packed with celebrity cameos and collaborations (that they don’t even make good use of) that leaves little room for interrogation.
In the movie, Emily Blunt’s Emily Charlton has moved away from the publishing industry to an executive position at Dior. As Andy (Anne Hathaway) tries to once again save Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) and Runway from impending ruin, Emily follows her own ambition and uses her new tech billionaire boyfriend to acquire the magazine for herself. In a cutting read, Priestley tells her, “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor,” as both insult and diagnosis. This was the film’s most engaging commentary on the industry, and yet, as the attempted coup falls through almost instantly, it fails to make any meaningful statement on what this means for fashion. Instead, the moment was played out as exaggerated industry satire – but it’s not satirical at all. It’s frighteningly true to life.
This is not the first time billionaires and tech companies have sponsored the Met Gala – since 2014, the event’s backers have included Aerin, Yahoo, Apple, Instagram and TikTok. But those were corporate alignments; abstract, at least on the surface, unlike the explicit inclusion we’re now seeing. This is the first time a private individual has been named as a lead sponsor, with Bezos and Sánchez reportedly contributing around $10 million to the festivities and positioning themselves at the centre of the event as honorary co-chairs.
At the same time, companies like Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, Snapchat and a growing roster of tech platforms are buying their way into the room, snapping up tables that now cost upwards of hundreds of thousands for the night. These are the same corporations that have spent the past decade dismantling the very structures that once sustained fashion’s ecosystem: from magazines to department stores, and the broader frameworks of authorship and editorial authority. If you can’t outright purchase taste, you can buy proximity to the people who define it. And the industry, rather than resisting, is accommodating: absorbing these players into its most visible cultural stage, even as their influence continues to erode the foundations it was built on.
Wintour’s version of the Met was strict, often exclusionary, and frequently criticised, but it was also disciplined. Access was tightly controlled, and however imperfect the system, it maintained a link (however tenuous) between invitation and cultural contribution.
This all coincides with the departure of Wintour, fashion’s supreme gatekeeper, whose control over the Gala has defined it for decades. Her version of the Met was strict, often exclusionary, and frequently criticised, but it was also disciplined. Access was tightly controlled, and however imperfect the system, it maintained a link (however tenuous) between invitation and cultural contribution. Her move from American Vogue to Condé Nast’s Global Head of Content initially felt like a simple title change, but as her distance from Vogue’s inner workings becomes more pronounced, it’s harder not to question what replaces that level of editorial control.
For a generation entering the industry, myself included, the decline of that old vanguard once felt overdue. The grip on fashion’s inner circles was water-tight, and the promise of something more open, and more reflective of the people actually shaping culture, felt necessary. But what’s replaced it is not a democratised system, it’s a more permeable one. Without a singular arbiter of taste, the Gala has become just another room to buy into, and in the absence of strong editorial control, capital isn’t just entering the room; it’s running it. The terms of entry are being rewritten by those with the most money and the least cultural stake in what fashion is supposed to represent. The red carpet now operates as a distribution channel for brands, partnerships, and carefully managed images engineered to perform across platforms. The clothes are still there, but they are no longer the point.
It’s not to say the film itself would have been more fashionable or included a more precise critique of Vogue if Wintour were at the helm, but I’d be surprised to see the magazine endorse the franchise to such a sincere and sickly degree. Under Wintour, fashion maintained the illusion (and, at times, the reality) that it set the terms, and that proximity to it was earned, but that hierarchy is now slipping. The scale of integration, across both the industry’s biggest film premiere and red carpet, suggests an industry no longer assured in its own value without external backing. This doesn’t read as a confident new era; it reads as desperation.
Outside the museum, onlookers have made their opinions known. In the weeks leading up to the Gala, New York has been papered with posters reading “Boycott the Bezos Met Ball: Brought to you by worker exploitation,” alongside mock campaigns highlighting Amazon’s links to ICE. Activist group Everyone Hates Elon has led much of the visual disruption, but they are not acting alone. Labour organisations, including the Service Employees International Union and the Amazon Labour Union, have organised a counter-event – a “Ball Without Billionaires” – where workers from Amazon, Uber and Starbucks will walk as models in garments by ethically-minded designers.
This resistance is not only taking place on the streets. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has broken with tradition to skip the event entirely, citing his focus on affordability in one of the world’s most expensive cities. High-profile regulars are reportedly absent: Zendaya, whose appearances typically dominate online Gala coverage, is expected to sit this year out, while even The Devil Wears Prada 2 star Meryl Streep will be notably absent from the staircase. Whether directly tied to sponsorship or not, the cumulative effect is the same: the event’s centre of gravity is shifting.
Prestige is an ephemeral beast, and what’s lost cannot be bought back.
This sits within a longer pattern of friction between the Gala and the world outside it, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” dress in 2021 to last year’s pro-Palestine protests attempting to block arrivals. But the tone has hardened, and is no longer symbolic or easily absorbed into the spectacle. It is targeted, materially grounded, and explicitly names the systems (labour, tech, capital) that underpin the night itself.
What remains to be seen is whether any of that tension breaches the carpet, or whether, once again, it is contained neatly outside the frame. Will I still be checking my phone tonight to see what Beyoncé rocks up in, or logging on tomorrow morning to see Matthieu Blazy’s first Met Gala outing at Chanel? Sure, but the vibe has shifted for good. Prestige is an ephemeral beast, and what’s lost cannot be bought back.
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