Hamnet actor Joe Alwyn made sure his 2026 Met Gala attendance was no Shakespearean tragedy.
Alwyn, 35, looked dapper in a Valentino suit styled by Rose Forde on Monday, May 4, at the annual Metropolitan Museum of Art fundraiser for its Costume Institute exhibit.
Alwyn entrusted makeup artist Holly Silius to complete his eye-catching, Roman-style look for fashion’s biggest night, which followed a “Fashion Is Art” dress code.
“You’re going to look at Joe and do a double-take because we want him to look really porcelain,” Silius told Vogue after Alwyn left the Mark Hotel.
Alwyn last attended the Met Gala in 2016, where he was rumored to have met now-ex Taylor Swift. Alwyn and Swift, 36, dated for six years before Us Weekly confirmed their breakup in April 2023.
“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathize and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,” he told The Times of London in June 2024 — his first comments on the breakup. “That is a hard thing to navigate. What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.”
Swift and Alwyn broke up in the middle of the pop star’s Eras Tour. She subsequently moved on with Matty Healy, but they called it quits by May 2023. Both splits presumably inspired more than a few cathartic tracks on Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.
“Tortured Poets album is, like, this purge of just everything bad that I felt for two years,” Swift said in her End of an Eras docuseries, which aired in December 2025. “It was a really rough time in my life, so the songs reflect that [and] feeling like I’m not a person. I’m just this big conglomerate that no one sees as a real human being and, like, especially not men that I date.”
She continued, “I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour, and that’s a lot of breakups actually. The show was what gave me purpose and was what I could use to get me out of bed. The tour has never been the hard thing in my life. The tour has been the thing that has allowed me to find purpose outside of the s*** that was going on in my life. Men will let you down, The Eras Tour never will.”
Swift started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce in summer 2023 and the pair got engaged two years later in August 2025. The couple, who are reportedly set to tie the knot this summer, didn’t appear to attend Monday’s Met Gala.
