The 2025 Met Gala is here! Some of the biggest celebrities will hit the red carpet for fashion’s biggest night on May 5, dressing for the theme, Tailored for You. Red carpet coverage of the Met Gala will begin at 6 p.m. EST and will be available on E!. Fans will also be able to stream the event on Vogue‘s digital platforms, including their YouTube page. The E! Red Carpet will be streamed on Peacock, E! Online, and YouTube. The Associated Press will also be providing live coverage of the celebrities leaving the Mark Hotel starting at 5 p.m. EST.
Along with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, actor Colman Domingo, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton, rapper A$AP Rocky, and singer Pharrell Williams will be co-hosting. Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James is serving as an honorary chair, but will not be attending the event because of a “knee injury I sustained at the end of the season,” he revealed on social media.
For the E! Red Carpet, fashion expert Zanna Roberts Rassi will be co-hosting the event alongside producer and NBC Sports host Maria Taylor, journalist Elaine Welteroth, actress and comedian Yvonne Orji, and designer Christian Siriano. Access Hollywood co-host Zuri Hall will also be a part of the broadcast, set to conduct interviews with the celebrities from the Met Gala steps.
As for Vogue‘s livestream, it will be hosted by singer and actor Teyana Taylor, actor and producer La La Anthony, and actor and comedian Ego Nwodim. Emma Chamberlain will serve as Vogue’s special correspondent.
In February, Vogue revealed that the theme for the 2025 Met Gala is Tailored for You based on a spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute titled, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” “The dress code is a nod to the exhibition’s focus on menswear and is ‘purposefully designed to provide guidance and invite creative interpretation,’ Vogue wrote. They also gave some insight into the upcoming exhibition. “‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ will explore the role of sartorial style in forming Black identities, focusing on the emergence, significance, and proliferation of the Black dandy. Composed of clothing, photographs, fine art, historical texts, and artifacts, it’s the first Costume Institute exhibition to focus on menswear since 2003’s “Men in Skirts” and was inspired by guest curator Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” Vogue’s Leah Faye Cooper added.
By now, you probably know the first Monday in May is not just any old Monday: It’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit, a.k.a. the Oscars of the East Coast or the party of the year. This year, however, things are a little more complicated, partly because the first Monday in May is also the middle of the N.B.A. playoffs, and the start of jury selection in the Sean Combs trial. Wait, why do the N.B.A. playoffs matter? Because LeBron James is the honorary chair of the gala, and if his Los Angeles Lakers had made it through to the conference semifinals, he wouldn’t have been able to attend. A season-ending loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves the Wednesday before the gala seemed to clear the way for his attendance, but the point is now moot: On Monday, Mr. James said on X that he would no longer be able to make it to the event because of a knee injury he sustained on the court. “Hate to miss an historical event!” he wrote. “My beautiful powerful Queen will be there holding the castle down as she always has done!”
Queen of all she surveys is Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast and the editor in chief of its marquee fashion magazine, Vogue. Ms. Wintour has been the gala’s chief mastermind since 1999, after first signing on in 1995, and has transformed the event from a run-of-the-mill charity gala into a mega-showcase for Vogue’s view of the world — the ultimate celebrity-power cocktail of famous names from fashion, film, tech, politics, sports and, increasingly, social media. Every brand scratches every other brand’s back. Standing beside Ms. Wintour as the 2025 gala’s co-chairs will be the musician and men’s wear designer Pharrell Williams, the rapper ASAP Rocky, the Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton and the actor Colman Domingo.
For the first time since 2019, there will also be a host committee, which, along with the chairs, is pretty much a mosaic of Black excellence: the athletes Simone Biles and Jonathan Owens, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Broadway star Audra McDonald, the singers Tyla and Usher — you get the idea.
Yes, always connected to the blockbuster exhibition that the party is celebrating. This year, that is the Costume Institute’s spring show, titled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which will focus on the history and influence of the Black dandy in the Western world, and the way fashion has been used as a tool of both enslavement and liberation. The show was inspired by the 2009 book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” by Monica L. Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, and it has been jointly curated by Professor Miller and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge. It is also the Costume Institute’s first show devoted solely to men’s wear since “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts” in 2003, and the first ever to feature only designers of color.
The exhibition is the culmination of a rebalancing of the Costume Institute’s holdings and approach that Mr. Bolton embraced in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. It has allowed Mr. Bolton to both use pieces from the Met’s own collection and acquire more pieces by designers of color. Last year, Professor Miller told The New York Times that the show was “an opportunity for everyone on the curatorial team to really understand how many Black designers, historically and contemporarily, are out there.” But it is also arriving in the world at a time when D.E.I. is under attack from the Trump administration. Similar efforts at universities and museums across the country have put a bull’s-eye on the institutions that embrace them.
Unlike other cultural heavyweights such as the Smithsonian Institution, which President Trump recently singled out in an executive order, the Metropolitan Museum receives very little federal funding, and so is much less vulnerable to pressure from Washington. As P. Diddy and the founder of the fashion line Sean John, Mr. Combs styled himself at one point as a sort of embodiment of the exhibition’s theme. If he had not been indicted on federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking last year, it’s almost certain he would have been at the event. (Mr. Combs, who has been held in a Brooklyn jail since September, used to attend the gala regularly, most recently in 2023, when he debuted “Sean John couture.”) Indeed, some involved were reportedly concerned that the tension between party and trial would interfere with the evening. There were even rumors of some requests to move the party, but that was a no-go.
At the 2025 Met Gala, the red carpet wasn’t red at all but rather midnight blue dotted with white-and-yellow blooms. The carpet’s motif—a narcissus flower, more commonly known as a daffodil—came from artist Cy Gavin. In an interview with Vogue, Gavin says he became fascinated with the spring perennial growing outside his upstate New York studio. To many, the bloom symbolizes the arrival of the new season—and since the Costume Institute fundraiser takes place on the first Monday of May, he felt a synergy existed between the two. Then there was the flower’s scientific name, which stems from the Greek myth of Narcissus. Gavin channeled his inspiration into a painting, “Untitled (Sky),” where the narcissus flowers are made to resemble stars in a night sky.
Meanwhile, set designer Derek McLane and event planner Raúl Àvila took Gavin’s motif and translated it into the sprawling carpet that covered the stairs of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And although it will be removed after the Met Gala is over, its meaning lives on in the thousands of photos taken by photographers as stars from Pharrell Williams to Savannah James made their way up to fashion’s biggest night.
The annual gala raised a record $31 million this year, the biggest gross in the event’s 77-year history. The guest list is a closely guarded secret. Unlike other cultural fund-raisers, like the Metropolitan Opera’s season-opening gala, the Met Gala is invitation-only. Qualifications for inclusion have more to do with buzz, achievement and beauty — Ms. Wintour’s holy trinity — than money. The Vogue editor has the final say over every invitation and attendee. That means that even if you give tons of money to the museum, you will not necessarily qualify, and even if a company buys a table, it cannot choose everyone who will sit at that table. It must run any proposed guests by Ms. Wintour and Vogue and pray for approval. This year, as in 2024, there are about 400 Chosen Ones attending the 2025 Met Gala.
With less than 24 hours until arrivals begin, Beyoncé is expected to still be on stage in Los Angeles, performing the third show of her Cowboy Carter Tour. But in the private jet era, stars have managed far gnarlier turnarounds. The celebrities are invited by brands (or by brands on the instruction of Vogue), who buy their seats at the table, in addition to custom-making their looks, flying them in and putting them up. In return, the famous guests work the fashion angle. They can also, of course, always make a donation to the museum.
