The Met Gala in New York is the grandest and ritziest event in the fashion calendar, and an indicator of the growing ties between designers, celebrity and power. But with tech billionaires now joining the cohort, this year’s party may be its most controversial yet.

All eyes are on the guest list – and their outfits – to launch the fashion exhibition Costume Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Nicole Kidman are chairing the event with Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and tickets cost about $100,000 (£73,500). But in a plot twist worthy of the new Devil Wears Prada film, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the Met Gala’s new honorary chairs, will be joining the 450 guests on the museum steps on Monday.

The billionaires’ involvement as the main source of funding for the exhibition and the party has set tongues wagging, reviving rumours that the Amazon founder will buy Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue, which oversees the gala. Last year there was speculation that Bezos would snap up the company as a wedding gift – it is thought the couple missed the 2025 gala only because of their starry wedding in Venice, although Sánchez Bezos appeared on Vogue’s digital cover in a Dolce & Gabbana wedding gown.

Skipping the event is Zohran Mamdani, breaking a decades-long tradition of New York mayors attending the gala. Parts of New York have been papered with posters criticising the couple’s involvement in the fundraiser, mounted by Everyone Hates Elon, a British activist group, which raised £15,000 in a week and is expected to be present on the night. “I love celebrity culture and fashion as much as anyone, but [Bezos’s involvement] makes Vogue seem irrelevant,” a spokesperson said. “Don’t tell me Bezos has been involved because of his fashion sense?”

Even before the politics, the gala dress code had become a hot topic. Titled “fashion is art”, it takes its cue from the exhibition’s theme, which argues that fashion and art are intertwined, “with bodies wearing clothes the common thread”, according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute.

Split into 13 “thematic” body types, from pregnant and ageing to disabled and variations on nudity, the exhibition pairs about 200 sculptures and artworks alongside 200 garments and accessories. “The focus is on bodies marginalised in fashion, and ones that haven’t been valorised in either fashion or western culture,” said Bolton.

Highlights include a contorted corset by Michaela Stark paired with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana and Serpent sculpture, and a Sarah Lucas work next to wearable art made out of “Nora Batty-like stockings” by the British designer Harry Pontefract.

A late Roman Venus Pudica sculpture is paired with a dress that uses strategically placed human hair by the British-Turkish designer Dilara Findikoglu. A Burberry trench belonging to the disability activist Sinéad Burke and Batsheva Hay’s Hag jumper also feature, as do Rei Kawakubo gowns and Vivienne Westwood’s Martyr to Love jacket, which resembles a man’s upper body.

As ever, the link between the gala’s dress code and what materialises on the museum steps is tangential. “I’m sure there will be some nakedness,” said Bolton. “I also think we’ll get a lot of goddess gowns. But I do worry people might take the theme literally and come as a painting. Or at least Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can.”

Still, he thinks the theme has never been more essential. “A lot of the developments fashion has made over the last few years have really eroded,” he said. “I don’t feel as if we’re seeing as much diversity on the runway as you did [then].”

While the theme will no doubt elicit some more literal translations, including Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian-inspired dresses, Cally Blackman, an associate lecturer of fashion history and theory at Central St Martins, hopes it will serve as a riposte to criticism about the value of fashion.

“It is the most powerful form of non-verbal communication that exists, yet we’re always fighting the battle [to prove its worth],” she said. “It’s only in the last 10 years that museums like the Met or the V&A have realised it gets more people over their thresholds.”

Bolton, who is preparing to reveal the Costume Institute’s new permanent home, the Condé M Nast Galleries, agrees. “For an art museum to position fashion in the centre of the building is symbolic,” he said. “I think people are realising not just the aesthetic value of fashion, but the social, cultural and personal ones.”

The gala is one of the most-watched red carpet events of the year, typically attracting 1bn global video views on Vogue’s site alone, and is fast outgrowing its philanthropic purpose, which is to raise funds for the New York museum. Blackman said: “The problem with the gala is that it’s … self-defeating. It’s not about fashion, it’s about publicity. I think a lot of the cache has gone because it’s funded by Jeff Bezos.”