In 1895, New York City drafted a law that would have made it illegal for disabled people to exist in public spaces. The law was never passed in NYC, but for nearly a century, other cities across America did. The last “ugly law,” as they were retroactively named, in the United States wasn’t repealed until 1974. Fifty-two years later, disabled people were in full, intentional display on fashion’s biggest and most exclusive night: the Met Gala.
For decades, the Met Gala’s famous stairs said the quiet part out loud. There’s no need to legislate exclusion when a physical barrier is already doing the job. This year, as a disabled person covering the event, I watched a tradition spanning almost 80 years shift in real time. For the first time in the Met Gala’s history, disabled people weren’t just present; we were centered. Not one, but five people with disabilities attended, and four of them—Sinéad Burke, Lauren Wasser, Aimee Mullins, and Lena Dunham—weren’t just guests, they were on the host committee.
This year, accessibility consulting firm Tilting the Lens and its CEO, writer and activist Sinéad Burke, created the framework for the most inclusive Met Gala in history—and an accompanying exhibit that is the culmination of her long-held mission: to cement, celebrate, and foster disabled people’s place in fashion. “The work that I do at Tilting the Lens is never about moments; it’s about system change,” Burke, who was dressed in custom Christian Siriano, said from the Met carpet. “Tonight is one example of a cog in that system change.”
Burke and Tilting the Lens worked alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art curators and staff over the course of 18 months to not only coordinate an accessible “Met-steps moment” for disabled attendees, but also to advocate for and help curate the Disabled Body section of the exhibition. This section includes nine mannequins of “fat and disabled bodies,” shown “through a lens of pride, beauty, and empowerment,” Burke said. “We’ve also trained all of the volunteer guides that will come through the exhibition over the next nine months to ensure that disability rights and disability justice are part of the framing.”
Burke made it a point to call out that although the pathway to the Met for disabled people now exists, the barriers that prevent our attendance from becoming commonplace rather than spectacle mean we should also be engaging disabled designers in a real way. “There are not enough disabled designers,” she said, “and we’re creating that pipeline of talent with a program at Parsons School of Design.”
Seeing disabled people finally celebrated for the way we artfully negotiate with life and fashion—both on the carpet and within the hallowed halls of the Met—brought tears to Burke’s eyes, and my own, as she stressed this final point before her moment in front of the cameras: “This is about the disabled people who can now imagine that they can be here.”
On the carpet, many guests expressed that this year’s theme felt omnipresent in their own understanding of fashion as embodied art, and in moments throughout history.
Tory Burch was one such voice as she reflected on her initial impressions of the Costume Art exhibit. “I love designing for different kinds of women, and to me, it’s a perfect adaptation of where fashion and art meet. Because, when you think through history, a lot of different body types were in fashion at different points. So it’s kind of fascinating.”
She’s right, but history is more radical than that. Rick Owens, often lauded for his irreverent minimalism, was one of the first to lead the charge in tapping Sandie Crisp, a disabled trans woman also known as Goddess Bunny, for his spring-summer 1998 campaign. Alexander McQueen, in his own moment of ingenuity and imagination for disabled bodies in fashion, created a look for athlete Aimee Mullins for his spring-summer 1999 show, including a leather corset, silk tiered skirt, and carved wooden prosthetic boots. Both pieces are currently part of the Met’s exhibit. Both were radical exceptions. Neither built anything lasting. Twenty-seven years after being McQueen’s muse, Mullins joined the Met’s host committee—the same year her look was immortalized in the museum.
In answer to who she was wearing that night, Burch revealed another pioneer whose work proves that the building blocks for a respected, enduring place for disabled bodies in fashion have long existed in the imaginations of some of fashion’s greatest minds, even if they never came together into a full structure: “I’m wearing vintage Thierry Mugler from 1987.”
Prabal Gurung sent multiple pieces up the Met steps, but the one that has left an indelible mark in my mind as an amputee—a design that will surely earn its own place in fashion history—was the look he designed for host committee member Lauren Wasser. Wasser, a double amputee, wore a custom gold short-suit, cut deliberately to showcase her infamous gold prosthetic legs.
There is often debate about whether it’s gauche to fully observe the Met Gala theme, but in my opinion, Gurung and Wasser not only understood the assignment, they continued the co-creative throughline established by McQueen’s work with Mullins in 1999. What McQueen proposed as radical art in 1999, Gurung executed as a garment for a woman attending fashion’s biggest night in 2026. The shift? The latter, given the surrounding context of the exhibit and the presence of other disabled attendees in custom couture co-creations, felt primed to become more than just a moment.
Perhaps the most iconic moment of the evening came when Aariana Rose Philip—a trans model, activist, and musician—made her Met Gala carpet debut, which was carefully coordinated to ensure she was able to have her “Met-steps moment” as the first wheelchair user to ever grace the carpet.
Over a year ago, in a group chat that included disabled icons like model and writer Bri Scalesse, we dreamed alongside Philip about what shape her Met Gala debut would take and when. As I interviewed her from the Met Gala carpet, we exuberantly gushed over the moment finally arriving—and in custom Collina Strada, no less.
“I feel like I don’t even feel real,” Philip said of that night. “I feel like a new concept. Tonight is about the whole disabled community, the whole Black trans community—it’s time for us to get put on.”
Philip’s look was the culmination of a six-year working relationship and friendship between her and designer Hillary Taymour, translated into a black silk-satin gown designed with Philip’s wheelchair and personal history in mind. “I just wanted to make it simple, elegant, give her moments of drama where she can have it—that suits her chair, and really just emphasizes her as a person,” Taymour said. “I really wanted it to be about my princess.”
This duo exemplified the indelible inspiration of disability and disabled bodies in fashion, and the opportunity available to designers who are curious and intuitive enough to pull the thread.
The tearful glances, grateful nods, and sentimental hand squeezes I exchanged with the other disabled attendees in the press box grounded me in a moment I hope fashion won’t soon forget. For all of its exclusion and foot-dragging, fashion is finally giving air to something the disabled community has long held and known: Body diversity drives fashion and art into the stratosphere of innovation, imagination, and empathy.
To stand on fashion’s hallowed ground with not one, but five disabled women felt delayed, yes, but was still exalting. Disabled people have long bent time around us in a concept known in disability theory as Crip Time. This year’s Met Gala is resounding proof that while we have often bent fashion to our bodies, needs, and whims, something more lasting and profound happens when fashion finally meets us halfway.
