As fashion’s elite strutted up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tinted an eerie, mildewy green for the Met Gala tonight, May 4, a small but rollicking crowd of protesters unfurled its own red carpet just a few blocks away. Orchestrated by the NYC-based advocacy group Rise and Resist, the action drew dozens of concerned, costumed citizens in a show of defiance against the billionaire class and Jeff Bezos, who is co-chairing this year’s event with his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
“It’s such an exercise in triviality and an ostentatious display of wealth and power a time when so many Americans are under serious, serious threat,” Jay W. Walker, the event’s emcee, told Hyperallergic.
The outfits gracing the “Resistance Runway” tackled grave encroachments on trans rights, warned of impending fascism, and advocated for “eating the rich.” But as participants formed an impromptu sidewalk dance party to the tune of ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money,” Walker described the event as “amazingly joyous.”
The Met Gala has long been a flashpoint for social issues. In 2024, pro-Palestine activists were arrested during a protest across Manhattan’s Upper East Side, when hundreds marched under the banner “No Met Gala while bombs drop in Gaza.” The previous year, the gala drew sharp condemnations over its honoree, Karl Lagerfeld, notorious for his vocal expressions of racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia.
But this year’s explicit association with Bezos — whose company Amazon is actively profiting from President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, who laid off one-third of staff at the Washington Post, who paid $75 million for the Melania documentary — made the fundraiser a particularly glaring illustration of political apathy. One protest sign tonight offered a cynical imagining of Bezos’s inner monologue: “Thank you for endorsing my ICE collaboration by dressing up for this moral shit show.”
Following weeks of outcry, the billionaire was reportedly a no-show on The Met’s red carpet, where his wife walked alone.
“The decision by these celebrities to show up to the Met Gala, despite Jeff Bezos chairing it, seems to me like an endorsement of the systematic violence that he and others like him perpetuate,” Elle Feneide, a political science and English double major at Manhattan University, told Hyperallergic.
Feneide held up her paint-splattered sign with the words “Your red carpet is stained with blood” above hordes of journalists and spectators who squeezed behind the barricades at 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, desperate to catch a glimpse of the A-listers. It was the only visible sign of resistance at the Met Gala entrance.
Though on-the-ground expressions were minimal tonight, activists have been rallying against the Met Gala for weeks, with the British group Everyone Hates Elon driving much of the effort. It was responsible for a massive boycott projection on the facade of Bezos’s Manhattan penthouse last night, a series of posters depicting tear-gas canisters wheatpasted across the city, and the covert placement of 300 bottles of fake urine throughout the museum, a reference to the strains endured by Amazon delivery drivers.
Cherie A., an activist with Rise and Resist who twirled down the makeshift runway in a skirt assembled of climate protest signs, told Hyperallergic that the group was founded by former members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to instigate political action via creative dissent. Among its many demonstrations, Rise and Resist rallied to oppose charges against two climate activists who smeared paint on the protective casing of an Edgar Degas work in 2023.
Karin Shaw, a protester in a bubblegum-pink Statue of Liberty crown who identified as “a post-menopausal woman who has less rights than my mother did 35 years ago,” emphasized the urgency of tonight’s demonstration.
“We’re here because Jeff Bezos and everything that he represents is destroying this country and this world,” Shaw told Hyperallergic. “Fascism in this country should not be pushed over for the sake of fashion for one night.”
