From Alleppey to the Met Gala: Kerala brand powers Met Gala 2026 carpet again

Dubai: There’s a lot that goes into the Met Gala before a single camera goes off. Months of fittings, theme decoding, last-minute tailoring and then there’s the carpet. The thing every celebrity walks on, poses on, and inevitably becomes part of fashion history.

This year, that foundation once again comes from Kerala, more specifically the backwaters of Alleppey. For the fourth time, Indian brand Neytt has created the carpet for the Met Gala, quietly continuing a streak that started in 2022.

What makes Neytt’s Met Gala run even more surreal is how it all started.

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Neytt, launched by Nimisha Srinivas and Sivan Santhosh, has built its identity around sustainable materials and local craftsmanship.

While Indian celebrities have increasingly claimed space on the Met Gala steps, brands like Neytt are doing something else entirely: becoming part of the infrastructure of the event itself.

According to Better India. The first time they worked on the carpet, they didn’t even know where it was going. It was just another project, sampling, prototyping, refining textures, sending swatches back and forth. Only after the final approval came through did they realise: this was for the Met Gala.

And even then, the scale of it didn’t fully land. Coming from a small town in Kerala, the Met wasn’t exactly everyday conversation. It took a moment and a bit of outside context for the magnitude of it all to sink in.

From the backwaters of Alleppey to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the journey is as layered as the carpet itself. According to The Nod Magazine, around 400 to 500 artisans worked on the piece over nearly 90 days, moving through multiple stages of production to get every detail right.

The numbers alone are staggering: 57 massive rolls, each measuring roughly 4 by 30 metres, coming together to cover about 6,840 square metres. All of it made in Kerala, then shipped across continents to be installed in New York, just in time for fashion’s biggest night.

It’s easy to overlook the carpet when you’re busy analysing outfits. But it’s also the one element every single guest interacts with. Every pose, every stumble, every iconic arrival, it all happens there.

So while the Met Gala will always be about spectacle, there’s something quietly satisfying about knowing that a piece of Kerala craftsmanship is quite literally holding it all together, again.