The Met Gala's history of controversy, from 'Harlem on My Mind' to Galliano

John Galliano's canceled retrospective is the latest entry in a long Met Gala record of controversies. And it likely won’t be the last.

Created by Eleanor Lambert and Dorothy Shaver in 1948 as a fundraiser for the Costume Institute, the Met Gala has evolved from a midnight dinner with tickets at 50 dollars to a highly publicized celebrity gathering with individual tickets costing 75,000 dollars in 2025, as per CBS News.

At first, the Costume Institute was considered primarily a study collection to support the research of fine arts. In 1959, it became a full curatorial department, organizing different exhibitions to celebrate the art of fashion. Since then, the exhibitions have often divided the fashion community.

"Harlem on My Mind"

In 1969, curator Allon Schoener and former Met director Thomas Hoving hosted "Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–68.” It might seem obvious that an exhibition about a community shouldn’t neglect the artwork of that community, but that wasn’t the case then. The exhibition, announced as a way to bridge “a growing gap between black and white people” by Hoving, failed to feature art of Black Americans, as told by African-American studies scholar Bridget R. Cooks in “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969).”

The Harlem Cultural Council, which had initially been invited by the Met for consultancy, withdrew its support for the exhibition before its opening. "The Met came to us with elaborate promises of community involvement in the show. But they haven't really begun to consult us. We're expected simply to be rubber stamps and window dressing,” the council’s executive director Edward K. Taylor Jr. said at the time.

The exhibition also drew criticism for antisemitic remarks published in a catalog, described by Dore Schary, the president of the Anti-Defamation League, as "something akin to the worst hatred ever spewed out by the Nazis," according to Cooks' research. The New York City Council threatened to withhold city funds to the Met unless it stopped selling the catalog.

Vreeland's era

In the 1970s, Diana Vreeland, who had left her position as editor-in-chief at Vogue magazine, assumed the gala’s organization and decided to match the annual Met Gala’s theme to the Costume Institute’s exhibitions. Vreeland faced criticism from within the museum world, with curators objecting to her displaying clothes without historical context and accusing her of prioritizing beauty over scholarship.

In 1973, Vreeland and the Costume Institute hosted “The World of Balenciaga,” honoring designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, who had died in 1972. The exhibition was criticized for being funded by the Spanish government, Iberia Airlines, and five Spanish banks, at a time when Spain was still under Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Franco's granddaughter's wedding dress was among the central pieces, as reported by USC-affiliated research by Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén.

The 1983–84 exhibition “Yves Saint Laurent: Twenty-Five Years of Design” marked the first time a major museum honored a living fashion designer with a solo retrospective. The decision to do so was criticized at the time as compromising curatorial independence and opening the door to fashion-industry commercial influence over the museum. The show was underwritten by the Pierre Bergé Foundation. Bergé was Saint Laurent's life partner and business partner — the co-founder of the house whose commercial value the exhibition directly enhanced.

Vreeland was also responsible for opening the Met Gala doors to celebrities. Before her, the event was primarily attended by names attached to the fashion industry and members of New York City’s high society. In 1995, Anna Wintour became chair of the gala and has since transformed it into what the event is today: a global red-carpet spectacle.

Anna Wintour

Commercial sponsorship became the recurring complaint after Wintour took over the event. The Costume Institute's 2005 Chanel retrospective was made possible by Chanel itself, with additional support from Condé Nast. Writing on the New York Times op-ed page that May, art critic Lee Rosenbaum argued the show was tainted by self-interested sponsorship, and that although Met officials claimed complete control over the exhibition, Karl Lagerfeld's fingerprints were everywhere. The same objection resurfaced in 2023 with "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty," which received support from Chanel, Fendi and the Karl Lagerfeld label. That exhibition drew separate criticism for honoring a designer with a long record of remarks against body positivity, immigrants, and the #MeToo movement; models protested outside the 2023 gala, and actress Jameela Jamil described Lagerfeld to her Instagram following as a known bigot. Wintour defended the choice by saying Lagerfeld was provocative and full of paradoxes, and sometimes said things to shock rather than things he believed.

In 2013, "Punk: Chaos to Couture" was accused of sanitizing a movement built on opposition to institutions like the Met. The International Herald Tribune's Suzy Menkes called it "sanitized and bloodless.” In 2015, "China: Through the Looking Glass" proposed in its own introductory text a less politicized reading of Orientalism as an appreciative Western response to the East — a framing Princeton scholar Anne Anlin Cheng argued amounted to the Met claiming its exhibition was Orientalism as though the admission absolved it. This critique later informed her seminal 2019 book, "Ornamentalism."

"Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" in 2018 became the most-attended exhibition in the museum's history, with more than 1.6 million visitors and 42 liturgical items on loan from the Vatican, but roughly 500 Catholics rallied on Fifth Avenue in protest, distributing a document titled "The Met's Heavenly Bodies Exhibition and the Catholic Church: An Impossible Coexistence." Liz Bucar, professor of comparative religion at Northeastern University, wrote that the show hijacked Catholic aesthetics and reduced theology, ritual, and vestments to eye candy. Four years later, the controversy shifted from the galleries to the carpet, when Kim Kardashian wore the Jean Louis gown Marilyn Monroe wore to sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" in 1962 to the "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" gala. Curators and dress historians objected to a historic garment being worn outside conservation conditions and questioned the choice on curatorial grounds, since Monroe had nothing to do with the late-19th-century Gilded Age the "gilded glamour" dress code referenced. Ripley's Believe It or Not!, which owns the dress, denied claims that it was damaged.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

In late 2025, the Met and Vogue announced that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as lead sponsors of the gala and its accompanying "Costume Art" exhibition, alongside secondary sponsors Saint Laurent and Condé Nast, a role reportedly costing the couple at least 10 million dollars, with one estimate putting it as high as 20 million. Backlash was immediate, with commenters on the museum's own Instagram post accusing the institution of selling to the highest bidder. Anna Wintour, who relinquished the Vogue US editorship in 2025 but remains Condé Nast's chief content officer and continues to oversee the gala, defended the arrangement to CNN, calling Sánchez Bezos a great lover of costume and fashion and saying she would be a wonderful asset to the museum and the event.

With all that history, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when news linked to the event ends up fueling a public debate. Such as, the announcement of a retrospective of Galliano’s work, which prompted protest from within the industry and is now canceled due to the designer’s 2011 antisemitic and racist remarks. The designer said he remains "fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past, particularly the hurt I caused to the Jewish and Asian communities." Wintour, who previously said “there is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano," supported his decision to pull out of the showcase as “very courageous and a measure of the man he is.”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has yet to announce a new spring Costume Institute exhibition for 2027.