Are Museums the New Runway? Inside the Fashion Exhibit's Luxury Takeover

"Every year, on the first Monday in May, people tune in to watch celebrities walk up the steps of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art on what's considered fashion's biggest night. Vogue-more specifically, Anna Wintour-has transformed the opening of its spring fashion exhibit into one of the most publicized moments of the Hollywood social calendar, drawing 1.2 billion views globally across platforms and wall-to-wall coverage from pretty much every form of media."

"Even if people seem more concerned with who was "on-theme" and who wasn't on the red carpet, the Met Gala is, at the end of the day, a fundraiser (and the main source of funding) for one of the preeminent fashion curatorial departments in the U.S. ( The 2025 Met Gala raised $31 million-an all-time record.) It's also brought attention to fashion exhibitions more broadly: By the time it closed in October 2018, the Costume Institute's "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" exhibit-which spanned 60,000 square feet across 25 galleries and two buildings (the Met Fifth Avenue and Met Cloisters)-was crowned the most visited show in the museum's history, hosting 1,659,647 onlookers."

"'Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty' created a moment where everybody took a step back and was like, 'Oh, maybe this fashion exhibition and fashion curation should be looked into a little more intensely,' argues Darnell-Jamal Lisby,"

The Met Gala takes place annually on the first Monday in May and draws massive global viewership. Anna Wintour transformed the Costume Institute's spring opening into a high-profile cultural moment. The event functions primarily as a fundraiser and is the main funding source for the museum's fashion curatorial department, with the 2025 Gala raising a record $31 million. High-profile exhibitions like "Heavenly Bodies" achieved historic attendance, demonstrating public appetite for fashion shows in museum contexts. Major museums have collected fashion and textiles for more than a century, and landmark exhibitions such as "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" shifted attention toward more serious fashion curation.

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