Culture Met Gala tickets, which are invite-only, cost $75,000. Here's what that gets attendees.

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Met Gala tickets, which are invite-only, cost $75,000. Here's what that gets attendees.​

• The Met Gala is famously exclusive.
• In 2025, individual tickets cost $75,000, while entire tables cost $350,000.
• Guests are treated to a cocktail hour, dinner, and exclusive performances.

Everyone knows how exclusive the Met Gala is.
Each year, the guest list is approved by Vogue's editor in chief, Anna Wintour, but attendance requires more than an invitation — there's also a hefty entry fee.

The New York Times reported that individual tickets for the 2025 Met Gala, a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, cost $75,000, and tables for 10 people start at $350,000.

However, celebrities are usually not the ones paying this price. Tables are generally purchased by design houses, brands, or companies, who then choose the guests they'd like to invite to the table, which requires approval from Wintour.

So, while only a select group of elite people experience the grandeur of the Met Gala, the rest of us are left to wonder what that entails.
Of course, there's the famed red carpet and the over-the-top fashion, but here's a peek inside the Met's walls — the cocktails, menus, exhibits, and exclusive performances attendees get to witness.

A ticket grants you the most important thing of all: access.​

There once was a time when even Kim Kardashiancouldn't get an invite to the Met Gala.
Amy Odell, the author of "Anna: The Biography," told Time in 2024 that an invitation was a "really huge signifier that you are 'in.'"

Eaddy Kiernan, Vogue's contributing editor and Met Gala organizer, told Vogue in 2024 that the seating chart started getting prepped in December but ultimately came together a month before the event.

"We really try to think very carefully about who's sitting next to each other," Kiernan said. "Our ideal pairing would maybe be two people who we think will just get on like a house on fire, but who may not even realize that they have a lot in common. So with each person, we really do take time to think, 'What will they talk about?'"

Such access and quality seating have the potential to yield incredible business outcomes.

With access secured, attendees walk the red carpet in outfits meticulously planned according to the dress code and theme.​

Here's Blake Lively at the 2018 Met Gala, which was themed "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination."

Once inside, they mingle during cocktail hour.​

Guests of the 2019 Met Gala could enjoy "crispy sea bass hors d'oeuvres, bits of foie gras, or mini-BLT towers," The Associated Press reported.

And, of course, it wouldn't be cocktail hour without the drinks.​

Here's a tray of one of the signature cocktails served at the 2023 gala.

Guests also have the opportunity to view the Met's exhibit during cocktail hour.​

The 2021 exhibit was "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art said this exhibit included about 100 men's and women's ensembles from the 1940s to the present, each displayed in cases representing 3D quilt patches. The exhibit was organized into 12 sections, exploring emotions such as joy, wonder, desire, and nostalgia.

After cocktail hour, guests take their seats for a formal dinner.​

In accordance with 2024's theme, "Sleeping Beauty: Reawakening Fashion," the tablescape was inspired by children's storybooks that "felt a bit romantic and ethereal," according to caterer Olivier Cheng.

"Drawing on inspiration from the lush gardens and palaces of Sleeping Beauty's fantasy world, we really aimed to build our own bite-sized fairytale," he told Vogue.

Drawing on the night's magical theme, the menu featured a "spring vegetable salad with elderflower foam, raspberry vinaigrette, and olive crumble that resembles soil, complete with butterfly-shaped croutons," inspired by Sleeping Beauty's reawakening.

The night's main course was a "filet of beef topped with a tortellini rose" designed to resemble fantastical castles.

The tables at the event were decorated with "English ivy, candelabras, and lettuce plates," and dark burgundy roses in floral centerpieces.

For the dessert, Cheng said he drew inspiration from Snow White's emblematic apple, which he turned into an "almond cremeux molded into the shape of a miniature apple, blanketed with a bright red mirror glaze."

The menu in 2018 included cacio e pepe pasta, baby lamb chops, lobster, and branzino.​

Dessert was gold-dusted truffles, chocolate-dipped cape gooseberries, and an amaretto Semifreddo cone topped with a gold pearl, Vogue reported.

Surprise performances are also a key feature of the night.​

Bieber's denim-on-denim outfit was more Canadian tuxedo than "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion," but we'd still love to know how the room reacted to his performance.

The tradition of Met Gala performances started in 2010, when Lady Gaga sang "Bad Romance" as part of the year's "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" exhibit.

Other notable performances include Frank Ocean's "Super Rich Kids" in 2014 and Madonna's "Like a Prayer" in 2018, per The Cut.

Ariana Grande was the latest Met Gala performer.​

Vogue reported that she performed some of her hits, such as "Into You," "Seven Rings," and "We Can't Be Friends." She also performed a rendition of the Disney song "Once Upon a Dream" from "Sleeping Beauty," paying homage to the gala's theme.

Her performance ended with a guest appearance from her "Wicked" costar, Cynthia Erivo.

Don't worry, attendees still have plenty of time to party.​

Here are the rappers Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and Doja Cat striking a pose in 2023.

For those who can't get enough of the fun, there's an annual after-party.​

The Met Gala started hosting its annual after-party in 2010.

Celebrities often change into different looks before hitting another round of red carpets and events.

Richie Akiva hosted the 2024 after-party.

 

[tehpope]

I, and many others, could use $75k for a down payment on a house. Or use it for closing costs, moving, and other fees when moving into a new home.

Spending it for a one time event isn't a good use of money. But I guess it doesn't matter when you have more money than god.

 

[Hitman One]

With $75k I could pay null enough to feature as many retarded posts as I like until the heat death of the universe.

 

[majob]

However, celebrities are usually not the ones paying this price. Tables are generally purchased by design houses, brands, or companies, who then choose the guests they'd like to invite to the table, which requires approval from Wintour.

The celebs aren't even paying to be there, They're getting paid to show up. It's all one giant advertisement

 

[Strix454]

The Met Gala's theme brought out just the kind of clowny behavior that would be expected:

See. See. He is wearing a piano on his back and he is carrying a trashbag. Its so clever.

 

[Positron]

[Anna Wintour] was the whorish daughter of a somewhat powerful British Newspaper editor. She arrived in the US in 1975 and became part of the extended porn entourage of Bob Guccione (Penthouse magazine). That ended in 1978 and she became the girlfriend of a sleazy French guy. She then slept her way into a job at New York Magazine and and used the position to network in New York rather than work.

Prostitute into pimp: a natural career progression.

And yes, high-class prostitution is still prostitution.

and olive crumble that resembles soil,

Curry that resembles shit next year?

 

[Strix454]

This is an article from the NY post discussing Anna Wintor's "porn years"..

Anna Wintor: Penthouse Vet

If there’s one magazine powerhouse not mourning the demise of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione last week, it’s probably Vogue’s Anna Wintour.

For a couple of years in the mid-’70s, the world’s most powerful fashionista was quietly on Guccione’s payroll, every day enduring a journey to her office that took her past a XXX-rated gallery of naked, splayed beauties and shapely ex-Penthouse Pets. On the other side of a divider from where she worked, Guccione edited his boundary-breaking magazine, while his wife, an ex-stripper, acted as Wintour’s boss and clashed with the future Vogue chief over her lavish expense accounts and taste in clothes.

Deathly embarrassed and ashamed of where she worked, she despised every minute of her tenure and later kept that part of her rise to the top well under the front-row radar.

But back then, in the Swinging ’70s, the girl needed work.

It was the Bicentennial summer of 1976: The Democrats had chosen Jimmy Carter as their presidential nominee, a Viking space probe had landed on Mars and Barbara Walters was the first female newscaster to land a $1 million-per-year contract, at ABC. At Harper’s Bazaar, 26-year-old British émigré Wintour, already wearing her iconic Louise Brooks bob and signature sunglasses, had been fired — yes, fired — from her first fashion magazine job in America after just nine months as a junior editor.

Wintour long claimed that she was shown the door “for being too European — they didn’t feel I understood the American woman.” But the magazine’s higher-ups actually gave Wintour her walking papers because they felt a lingerie shoot she oversaw was far too risqué.

Risqué was right up Bob Guccione’s alley, and the same was true of his very kinky wife and business partner at the time, Kathy Keeton, who had founded Viva — the “International Magazine for Women” — with cash generated by Guccione’s X-rated Penthouse.

In shock over being fired, and unemployed for several months, Wintour was desperate for work. With the help of her lover at the time, who had contacts at Penthouse, Wintour lucked out. Viva was searching for a new fashion editor. The last one had been ousted in one of the magazine’s ritual Friday-night massacres by the very eccentric Keeton, a former exotic dancer who ran the shop in skin-tight pants, halter top and do-me heels. She sat behind an enormous desk guarded by a pair of fierce Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

Wintour was hired, but it was a strange fit. Viva’s editorial offices were located just across a divider from Penthouse, so from the day the Yves Saint Laurent-clad Wintour walked in, she worked right next to the layout desk where Guccione selected his magazine’s gynecologically explicit photos, and where the raunchy “Dear Penthouse” letters were drafted.

As a colleague of Wintour’s asserted years later, “Anna was no prude, but she felt like she was working in a sewer. The whole place was pornographic, and here was this very proper, very pretty young Brit with aspirations of running Vogue virtually surrounded by glossy photos of big boobs.”

Many of the other female employees — the Penthouse secretaries and hostesses — were former subjects in the magazine, with “big hair, lots of makeup, and enormous boobs,” according to a Viva staffer. Beyond that, Wintour had to deal with the art department and copy-editing desk, which Viva shared with Penthouse.

A close female friend of Wintour’s from back then was shocked that she actually was involved with a Penthouse operation. “She told me she was working for that awful Bob Guccione. I said, ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.’ But Anna said, ‘Well, one needs a job. Work is work.’ I know she felt awkward there.”

Even Viva’s editor at the time, Alma Moore, saw that her new hire was uncomfortable with the workplace. “There was embarrassment on Anna’s part, and maybe her family said, ‘Are you sure you want to be working at a place like that?’”

Wintour was not only the editor, but the fashion department’s sole staffer in the beginning, and in the month she took over, Viva featured an article headlined: “How to throw fabulous parties, create new faces, wear silk stockings, have sex fantasies and perfect orgasms.”

Somehow the editors at the snarky British magazine Private Eye heard about Wintour’s new job, and immediately reported that she was “working on a porn magazine.” They described her as “pulchritudinous.”

Despite the surroundings, Wintour was given carte blanche to run Viva’s fashion section in as classy a way as she chose — at least in the beginning — and she took her job seriously. She needed only to report to Moore and Keeton. As Moore noted, “She was very sure of herself, decisive, a woman to be reckoned with.”

Soon Wintour was coming to work attired somewhat more in line with her erotic surroundings. Co-workers remember her in one particular outfit: jodhpurs worn with riding boots, missing only a dominatrix crop. And at times she acted like one, recalled colleagues, who witnessed her verbally flagellating a female assistant if anything went wrong. To relax, Wintour took to hanging out with some favorite Penthouse editors across the street at P.J. Clarke’s.

Nevertheless, Wintour despised Viva, Penthouse, Guccione and Keeton, colleagues have claimed. As a female advertising executive at Penthouse later explained, “Anna thought the whole company was tainted. If it had been Condé Nast, and we had fashion editors who went to Paris, she would have thought it wonderful.”

The relationship between Wintour and Keeton became strained, primarily over the fashion editor’s expenditures and differences in style. Moreover, Guccione had run into financial problems, and Viva’s budgets were slashed.

In late 1978, Guccione announced that Viva would cease publication. Wintour was spotted crying before she stormed out of the office, once again without a job.

Having spent two years running Viva’s fashion pages, she was as surreptitious as she could be about her former employer — ignoring, downplaying and even fibbing a bit about the time she once worked there. In a London newspaper profile years later when she was at Vogue, which she joined in 1983, she stated, “Once I got over being fired [at Harper’s Bazaar] I did a little freelance again before getting a job at New York magazine.”

And just like that, she had made her life with Bob Guccione and Viva disappear.

 

[Eventide]

She finally made the right personal connection with a man high up in Conde Nast and got into US Vogue as a "creative director".

Didn't she allegedly suck off her boss (and Conde Nast owner) the late Si Newhouse, to get her US Vogue position? Well, I guess that counts as a "personal connection"

 

[Positron]

As a colleague of Wintour’s asserted years later, “Anna was no prude, but she felt like she was working in a sewer.

Where she rightly belongs.

Didn't she allegedly suck off her boss (and Conde Nast owner) the late Si Newhouse, to get her US Vogue position? Well, I guess that counts as a "personal connection"

A very sticky connection.

 

[Troutsmacked]

I know it's technically a charity event but good Lord I can't help but think of all the cool stuff you could do with $75k and they blow it on this gay shit.