What does Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos’ sponsorship mean for the 2026 Met Gala?
Money can buy you many things — including a seat at the head of fashion’s most exclusive table.
Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, have been named the lead sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala and Costume Institute exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Monday.
The world’s fourth-richest man, worth $234 billion, and the former TV journalist, 55, will foot much of the bill for the May 4 event — and could influence who gets a coveted invitation.
A few of the famous faces we’re likely to see? The guest list for the couple’s $50 million nuptials this past June may offer some hints. Their star-studded Venice festivities drew Sydney Sweeney, the Kardashian-Jenners, Katy Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Karlie Kloss, Ivanka Trump, plus Josh and Jared Kushner.
The 2026 exhibition, “Costume Art,” will “focus on the centrality of the dressed body within the Museum, connecting artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form,” according to curator Andrew Bolton.
Each year, longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour selects a group of celebrity co-hosts to help chair the event; these stars arrive first on the carpet and typically have ties to the theme in some way. Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and LeBron James co-chaired 2025’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibition, while Michaela Coel, Dua Lipa, Roger Federer, and Penelope Cruz were picked for 2024’s “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.”
No Kardashian-Jenner has ever co-hosted the event, and Kim may be a shoo-in (if a controversial one) given this year’s theme. Sweeney, too, is in the headlines more than ever and would drum up buzz for the gala, although she has less of a relationship with Vogue and has only been attending the gala since 2022.
There’s also the question of the dress code, which provides guests with further guidance for their custom looks, but has yet to be released. For example, the historical leaning “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” gala in 2022 called for “gilded glamour, white tie,” which led to Kardashian’s infamous decision to pull one of Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dresses from the archives.
Amy Odell, who wrote a best-selling biography of Anna Wintour, theorized in a video that the “Costume Art” dress code will encourage celebrities to don their best “naked” dresses, thus driving up online engagement.
This would be a fitting direction for Sánchez, who tends to favor figure-hugging designs and rarely shies away from sheer.
The couple isn’t the first billionaires to underwrite the event: In 2018, Blackstone CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman and his wife, Christine, helped fund the Met’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition, which ultimately became the most-visited show in the museum’s history, with more than 1.6 million visitors.
They wrote a check for around $5 million at the time, the Times reported, suggesting the Sánchez-Bezos donation is well into the seven figures — at a minimum.
Anna Wintour told the New York Times that Sánchez “loves costumes” and “loves fashion,” defending the choice of the couple as sponsors. Additional support will come from Saint Laurent and Condé Nast.
This isn’t Bezos’ first time at the Met Gala. He served as honorary chair of the 2012 event, which Amazon sponsored, attending with his then-wife Mackenzie Scott. He also went solo to the 2019 “Camp: Notes on Fashion”-themed event.
