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 Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who has been in charge of the event for the past 30 years. During that time, she has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Met’s Costume Institute. In 2014, to recognize all that she has done, the Costume Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center, and now includes a state-of-the art conservation lab, 4,200 square feet of gallery space, and the Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, named after the founder of a predecessor organization.
