Last night, stars posed outside the Met Gala in gowns adorned with feathers, covered in crystals and even emitting bubbles. The festivities celebrated the Costume Institute’s spring show, “Costume Art,” and its new home in the Condé M. Nast Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was also less about showcasing fashion’s biggest trends than using the industry’s biggest talents to design outfits capable of generating viral moments.
The night and its lead sponsors, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, had drawn attention from critics who accuse the tech billionaire of dodging taxes, cozying up to President Trump and fostering exploitative working conditions in Amazon warehouses.
After a protester tried to jump the barricade at the museum, the gala continued largely undisturbed. And long after the photographers had left the green cobblestone carpet, celebrities filed into after-parties across New York City.
Here’s a look at who was out, and what they wore.
“I didn’t go to the Met Gala, because my credit card didn’t go through,” Ann Dexter-Jones, a fixture on New York’s social scene, joked shortly before midnight on Monday.
She was standing by the bar inside Boom at the top of the Standard, where the views stretch all the way to the Costume Institute.
As recently as a few years ago, this annual shebang in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan was the most reliable place to spot Naomi Campbell at the edge of the dance floor sandwiched between Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper.
Now, it’s more like a spot ASAP Rocky stops by while making the rounds through a trove of parties all over downtown Manhattan. The night has become a birthday party not only for Vogue — and those anointed as being worthy of attendance — but seemingly everyone in and around the fashion industry.
Here, bedazzled in sequins, was the designer Marc Bouwer, and there, in a velvety black gown looking like a space age Cruella de Vil, was the model Coco Rocha.
Many believed that the gala’s guest list this year would suffer as a result of the exhibition being sponsored by the Bezoses, who have become symbols for the excesses of the megarich.
The designer Christian Siriano was one of them.
Yet, standing at the bar, sipping a spicy martini as Questlove spun vintage Chaka Khan, he couldn’t help but marvel at the gala’s turnout.
“Cher, Madonna, Beyoncé, Rihanna,” Siriano said, rattling off just a few of the names of famous women who showed up this year, despite having precisely the sort of fan bases whose politics would seemingly be at odds with a tech billionaire who, among other things, serves as the executive chairman of a company that recently paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump.
In walked Ellen von Unwerth, a fashion photographer who was criticized this year after she photographed the first lady for the film’s poster and then posed on the red carpet at a screening for it.
Surely, this had secured her an invite to the gala?
“No,” she said, shaking her head.
A reporter tried to press her further about the reaction to her work for the first lady but struck out. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
By the banquettes was Luke Evans, who is currently appearing on Broadway in “The Rocky Horror Show” as Frank-N-Furter. He had wrangled an invite to the gala, where he wore a studded leather ensemble that made him look like a drawing by the artist Tom of Finland, come to life.
“That was the inspiration!” he said, shortly before Kelela gave a short performance on top of the bar and the Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn arrived.
During this year’s Winter Olympics, Vonn suffered a nearly catastrophic crash in which she shattered her left tibia and fibula and her right ankle. Now, she was decked out in black Thom Browne, dancing to Missy Elliott with the aid of a chic and sparkly cane.
“I’m trying,” she said.
The actress Grace Gummer, who co-hosted the party with the designer Gabriela Hearst, mingled nearby in a hooded Hearst dress.
Several days before, Gummer’s mother, Meryl Streep, had made it clear during the promotional tour for “The Devil Wears Prada 2” that she had no interest in going to the Met Gala.
“It’s not her thing,” Gummer said, shrugging. — Jacob Bernstein
Across town, the celebrations continued at the bar Monsieur. At 2 a.m., it was bustling.
Roughly two years ago, the nightlife mavens Jon Neidich and Craig Atlas took over the ground-floor space at 86 East 4th Street, where a gay bar called the Boiler Room had previously been located.
To help update the place as Monsieur, Neidich and Atlas turned to the movie director Baz Luhrmann and Luhrmann’s wife, the costume designer Catherine Martin. The couple lives nearby and was happy to carry on the legacy of a room that has a storied history in the East Village.
What better way to help promote its transition from a dive to a luxe medieval bar than to host a party celebrating the Met Gala?
After all, Luhrmann and Martin are close friends with Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast.
In 2023 and 2024, Luhrmann directed the Met Gala’s musical performances. Last year, he took part in Vogue World, another large-scale event that has helped Wintour update the magazine for the TikTok era.
On Tuesday morning, Luhrmann was standing at the center of the dance floor, talking about how much he enjoyed seeing Sabrina Carpenter perform with Stevie Nicks that evening.
The D.J. was playing Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own.”
By the front door was the Australian model Miranda Kerr, who, in the lead-up to the gala, had posted a slew of stories to Instagram cataloging her red carpet journey. In her posts, she plugged the designer of her dress (Jonathan Anderson of Dior), the hotel she got ready at (The Mark), and the maker of lip glosses and moisturizers responsible for rendering her an avatar of dewy perfection (Kora Organics), her product line.
She even plugged the facialist who gave her a “micro-current lift,” a nonsurgical cosmetic procedure that uses low levels of electricity to temporarily lift and tone the face (Tracie Martyn).
A few feet away from Kerr was Dianne Brill, a downtown denizen whose blond hair stretched nearly to the ceiling and who joked that she had not been invited to the gala “in like a hundred thousand years.”
Up walked Martin, who, in addition to winning Oscars for costume and production design for her work on films directed by Luhrmann, also helped design Monsieur.
Unlike others, she was perfectly willing to discuss the evening’s biggest controversy: the Bezoses, if only to defend the Costume Institute’s willingness to take their money. “Art and commerce is always an uneasy mix,” she said, adding that in creative industries, “We all have sponsors.”
Still, she thought that the willingness of a tech billionaire to support a museum exhibition was a net positive.
“It’s a generous act,” she said. “I mean, you could just not give your money! That’s a choice, too!” — J. B.
Further downtown, around 2:30 a.m., the rappers Busta Rhymes and Ty Dolla Sign arrived at a party at the Lower East Side nightclub the Box, where about 300 people, many in shimmering blazers and sequin dresses, lined the stage.
Half a dozen topless performers wearing flower crowns, antler headdresses, bedazzled nipple covers and tasseled thongs gyrated — their stomachs shimmering with body glitter — as the D.J., Kaytranada, spun songs like Dennis Ferrer’s “Hey Hey.”
Waiters circled the room with silver trays of sliders as the models Imaan Hammam and Adut Akech, the fencer Miles Chamley-Watson and the Public School designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne stationed themselves in booths beside the stage.
Blue and red spotlights roamed the crowd. Scantily dressed dancers in sky-high heels climbed atop the bar and shimmied beneath a disco ball.
“We about to have fun and get loose tonight,” Kaytranada bellowed into the mic from the stage.
Around 3:15 a.m., the D.J. and music producer Diplo arrived, entourage in tow.
Guests pressed in around him as he began his set, their glowing phone screens held aloft. Soon after, Lisa, the singer and rapper from the K-pop group Blackpink, arrived and held court at the bar.
“Let’s go!” Diplo yelled out. — Sarah Bahr
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