At the 2026 Met Gala, themed “Costume Art” with a “Fashion is Art” dress code, luxury watches became sculptural statements as vital as the gowns. From Irina Shayk’s Cartier pieces reimagined as cuffs, choker and bralette to Serena Williams’s open-worked Royal Oak, stars used horology as wearable architecture, blurring lines between jewellery, fashion and fine watchmaking.
Every first Monday in May, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art become the most scrutinised stretch of pavement in the world. The Met Gala — an annual, invitation-only fundraising benefit for the Met's Costume Institute has, since its modern reinvention, functioned simultaneously as fashion's grandest theatre and one of New York's most significant philanthropic occasions. This year's theme, "Costume Art," set the stage with characteristic ambition, inviting guests to reckon with 5,000 years of art history and the dressed body as a curated art form. The corresponding dress code, "Fashion is Art," called for outfits treated as living sculptures or masterpieces, and the watches on the red carpet rose to meet the brief with equal seriousness.
Because while the gala's sartorial spectacle tends to dominate the conversation, the wrist has quietly become one of its most considered canvases. Here, then, are the timepieces that earned a second look.
The most conceptually daring watch moment of the evening was not, strictly speaking, a single watch. Irina Shayk arrived in a custom Alexander Wang look that treated horology as raw material: Two watches cuffed to each arm — one worn as a choker, and the other, most dramatically, a sculptural bralette. Wang simply noted, "She's got time today." The references were drawn from Cartier's archival Panthère and Santos codes, with the overall effect positioning the maison's timepieces as wearable architecture. It was a moment that collapsed the boundaries between jewellery, fashion, and watchmaking into something genuinely new and by the evening's “Fashion is Art" brief.
Angela Bassett wore a Prabal Gurung gown inspired by Laura Wheeler Waring's Girl in a Pink Dress (a painting currently on display at the Met itself), and chose to complement it with a vintage Glashütte Original from the 1970s. This specific model, the 32.5 mm Serenade Luna — features a mother-of-pearl dial, a diamond-set bezel and hour markers, and an alligator leather strap. It is an extraordinary piece: Delicate without being slight, historic without being precious. Bassett's pairing with her blue velvet ensemble was a masterclass in intentional accessorising, and it marked, remarkably, the first time a Glashütte Original has appeared on the Met Gala red carpet. For a relatively niche manufacturer based in the Saxon town of Glashütte in Germany, the exposure on one of the world's most photographed evenings was significant.
As a longstanding Audemars Piguet ambassador, Serena Williams has done much to shift the conversation around who wears serious mechanical watches, and at this year's Gala, she made the point with characteristic directness. Paired with a Grecian-inspired metallic dress by Marc Jacobs, she wore the new open-worked Royal Oak Selfwinding Perpetual Calendar in a 41 mm titanium case. The sapphire dial reveals the movement beneath, its matching subdials finished with 18k pink gold hands and luminescent hour markers, the whole assembly framed by a black inner bezel. It was an appropriate choice for an evening dedicated to looking carefully at things.
There is something fitting about Nicole Kidman selecting an Omega Constellation Manhattan from 1982 for an evening themed around art and the body. The compact 23 mm design in 18k white and yellow gold is fully set with diamonds across the bezel, bracelet, and dial markers — a jewel-like execution that blurs the line between haute horlogerie and high jewellery. It is precisely the kind of piece that benefits from a theme like "Fashion is Art": Small in scale but dense in intention, drawing on Omega's archival design sensibility.
Connor Storrie, the Heated Rivalry star fast becoming one of red carpet's more reliable watch moments — arrived in Saint Laurent alongside a brand-new Omega Constellation Observatory in 18k Moonshine Gold on a Moonshine bracelet. The 39.4 mm case, warm in tone and precise in its architectural lines, reflects the brand’s evolution of the Constellation line into something contemporary without sacrificing the technical authority the collection has always carried. It was a sharp choice: A newly released reference on an emerging face, each lending the other a degree of credibility.
Bad Bunny arrived at this year's Gala as an aged version of himself, cane included and wore a vintage Cartier Cloche de Cartier from 1996 in yellow gold to complete the effect. The Cloche is one of Cartier's more singular horological propositions: A bell-shaped case that sits vertically on the wrist, its dial orientation transforming the act of reading the time into a small, considered gesture. Originally conceived from art deco experimentation, it remains one of the maison's most compelling arguments for watchmaking as sculpture. On Bad Bunny's wrist, in this context, it read not as an eccentric choice but as a perfectly calibrated one.
Dwayne Johnson made his Met Gala debut in Thom Browne, and chose to mark the occasion with appropriate scale. The Jacob & Co. Billionaire III, set with 714 emerald-cut white diamonds totalling nearly 130 carats and valued at approximately USD 3 million(INR 28 Cr.) truly stood apart. Its skeletonised movement and architectural construction transformed the timepiece into something closer to a wearable sculpture. Only 18 will be produced. Johnson, fittingly, wore his.
K-pop's most conspicuous global presence arrived in a sculpted, veiled gown that featured two architectural prosthetic arms — one of which was wrapped, with considerable drama, in a diamond-encrusted Bulgari Serpenti Spiga. The piece, coiling around the limb like the serpent motifs that have defined Bulgari's jewellery language for decades, functioned here less as an accessory than as an extension of the costume itself. In the context of a gala devoted to the body as an art form, it was among the evening's more literalist interpretations — and all the more effective for it.