The Roxhill Insights team looked at the media narratives of the Met Gala to discover the reputational winners and conversation drivers.
Few cultural events generate as much media attention as the Met Gala, as celebrities and their outfits are splashed over socials, and designers and brands compete for all-important share of voice and plaudits in the headlines.
Like any closely-watched event generating thousands of posts and articles, making sense of who has won and lost reputationally can be a complex challenge for any media measurement methodology. With so many stakeholders, journalists, platforms and influencers involved, a 360-degree approach to media evaluation is essential.
In the lead up to and aftermath of this year’s event, the Roxhill Insights team processed over 92,300 articles and 9.7m social posts, running through the full spectrum of analysis metrics.
We contextualised coverage and mapped media narratives surrounding the Met Gala to distil the most important reputational trends from this year’s event.
The reigning monarch: Rihanna
Metric: persistent headline imagery
Image credit: Getty Images
Memorable photos live on in the social (media) consciousness for years, and iconic moments provide intangible value for the designer and the wearer.
Google Chinese couturier Guo Pei, for example, and the yellow dress worn by Rihanna in 2015 will turn up.
Likewise, if you search for ‘Rihanna Met Gala’, the same outfit will be among the first shown.
Rihanna’s appearance and arrival have become synonymous with the Met Gala. It has been 18 years since she first graced the museum steps, and in the past decade alone hers has been the headline photo for over half of the events.
This year, her name featured prominently across both trade and consumer press, with as many headlines for her outfit as for her pregnancy, proving her status as both a popular celebrity and a fashion icon.
Even though the theme of 2025’s gala was inspired by a menswear exhibition, the top three most featured celebrities on website front pages were all women: Rihanna, Zendaya and Diana Ross.
The appearances of Rihanna and Zendaya were both highly anticipated – the image of Zendaya’s 2024 gown was among the most featured on websites, from Harper’s Bazaar and the Daily Mail to Forbes and Business Insider, in the build-up to this event.
The New York Times even featured a dedicated tab for coverage of Rihanna’s arrival. Ross, with the most elaborate train of the night, proved a more unexpected attention-grabber.
Notable mentions for photo coverage go to Colman Domingo and Lewis Hamilton, both co-chairs of the event.
The top designer: Thom Browne
Metric: weighted share of voice
Image credit: Getty Images
Valentino dressed Thai superstar Freen, Marc Jacobs dressed the most photographed woman of the evening (Rihanna), but designer Thom Browne had no fewer than five dedicated articles in celebrity and fashion-focussed outlets.
Vogue carried the headline “Anok Yai’s 2025 Met Gala Look By Thom Browne Is One Of The Smartest Responses To The Theme”, WWD featured an article on the dress worn by Lorde, while Vanity Fair included an interview with another Thom Browne-wearer, Walton Goggins.
It was Browne’s surreal multi-layered creation sported by Janelle Monae (above), however, that generated the most individual articles, cementing Browne as a Met Gala winner.
The “Tailored to You” theme aligns with the messaging in Thom Browne’s A/W25 collection, which incorporated “the hallmarks of traditional menswear tailoring” with elements of “pure fantasy”.
The overwhelmingly positive sentiment across the articles will have been welcome for the brand, after Vogue Business and Fashion United both reported on its sharp YOY wholesale decline for Q1.
Honourable mention to Grace Wales Bonner who dressed a number of attendees including Lewis Hamilton, and received as much coverage in two days as she had in the previous four months.
How content was 'tailored' to audience
Metric: article messaging evaluation
“Tailored to You” could apply to much of the event coverage as easily as to the attendees, as outlets “tailored” their output according to their audience.
Generalist and national outlets focussed on recognisable film and music personalities, while higher-end fashion publications pored over the subtle homages to Andre Leon Talley (WWD) or Zelda Valdez (Harper’s Bazaar), and CNN went full CNN, writing about Kamala Harris.
Of all the top tier outlets, the FT and Bloomberg carried the least coverage of the event, with just one article apiece. The FT’s offering – ‘At the Met Gala, the suit takes centre stage‘ by Robert Cordero – was also fashionably late, preferring a qualitative assessment of the event over jostling with the churn of up-to-the minute coverage.
There were many takes on who “won” the evening, such as UK Vogue’s declaration that ‘Independent British Designers Won The 2025 Met Gala’, including Wales Bonner and Ozwald Boateng. Meanwhile Esquire felt that Louis Vuitton’s creative director Pharrell had clinched it, with his “vision of contemporary Black Dandyism”.
Social media dominance: K-pop superstars Freen, Lisa, and Jennie
Metric: global conversation driving
It seems fandom is real, especially in Thailand. Global mentions of Thai actress and model Freen, White Lotus and K-pop star Lisa Manobal, and K-pop band member Jennie, appeared to outnumber Rihanna’s mentions 20:1.
But how much does chatter matter? Broken down by demographic, we saw that Freen, Lisa and Jennie’s fans are heavily concentrated (over 50%) in Thailand and in the 18-24 age bracket, while Rihanna had a more even spread, globally, among users aged 18 to 44.
Ozwald Boateng experienced one of the greatest social media boosts, with his mentions leaping 3,500% from his monthly average.
For Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan, the Met Gala was just another Monday. He managed to rank 7th among attendees for social media mentions during the Met Gala – this wasn’t even his highest day of the month.
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