On Monday May 4, the steps of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art once again played host to the Met Gala 2026 red carpet. Spectacular beauty looks by today’s leading makeup artists and hair stylists were the order of the day.
The theme of this year’s Costume Institute exhibition was Costume Art: a dizzying plunge into 400 objects spanning more than 5,000 years of history, exploring the inseparable link between clothing, the body and art. The dress code imposed on guests at the Met Gala 2026, meanwhile, was Fashion Is Art: an open, almost philosophical invitation to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form and to celebrate the countless representations of the clothed body throughout the history of art. A vast program. And an ideal playground for pigment artists. On the program: skins worked like canvases, architectural liners worthy of minimalist sculpture, maximalist eyelashes verging on gold and hairstyles adorned with metallic jewels blurring the boundary between headpiece and hair.
