Once upon a Time in Gala-Land

Anna Wintour attending the Met Gala in 1995.

How a midnight dinner for fashion insiders became a multi-million-dollar media spectacle, culminating with this year’s sponsorship by none other than the Bezoses

By William D. Cohan

In the past five years, the so-called Met Gala—the annual one-day benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue—has raised some $113 million, including a record $31 million last May. That’s a lot of money, and more than any other cultural institution in New York City has ever raised at its yearly gala.

It takes a village, of course, to achieve this level of fundraising prowess, and it probably would not have been possible to generate anywhere near this much money, let alone the extraordinary media attention that surrounds the Met Gala, without the leadership of the legendary former READ ON