New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji will break a long-standing tradition and won't be attending the Met Gala on May 4, the glamorous fundraising fashion event organised every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, helmed by former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.
The luxurious event attracts some of the wealthiest people in New York and the world, and Mamdani, elected last year, has based his campaign on increasing taxation of the ultra-wealthy, protecting the working class with universal child care, free city buses or a minimum wage, and criticising the system that allows the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, saying that "there shouldn't be any billionaires".
An anonymous source from New York Post's celebrity magazine Page Six said that "He's not coming. And it would be foolish if he did ... can you imagine? It goes against everything he believes in."
"Historic no-show" from Mamdani to Anna Wintour
Mamdani, the first Muslim New York City mayor, and at 34, the youngest in over 135 years, will stand up Anna Wintour, still head of the Met Gala despite resigning from Vogue in June 2025, one of the most influential people in the fashion world, who inspired the famous novel and then the movie The Devil Wears Prada and was played by Meryl Streep. The sequel to the movie is opening on May 1, the same week as the 2026 Met Gala.
Wintour is a known supporter of Mamdani's Democratic Party, who raised funds for Hillary Clinton and Biden, and has criticised Trump, was also the author of Michelle Obama's first magazine cover, which means Mamdani's decision not to attend more noteworthy.
The event will be filled with millionaires who Mamdani wants to raises taxes, but one in particular crosses a red line: Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez, main promoters of the 2026 gala. Their presence has led to a louder rejection to the Gala by New Yorkers, with posters asking to boycott the Met Gala and linking them to the ICE and to work exploitation, referring to Amazon providing cloud services to the ICE, as reported by El País. Bezos recently bought The Washington Post and laid off a third of its workforce and aligned its editorial line closer to Trump.
Wintour and Bezos' close relationship has been heavily criticised by the progressive people in United States that still supported Wintour: Vogue's cover featuring Lauren Sánchez Bezos with a wedding dress from June 2025 was one of the most criticised covers in the history of the magazine.
