Colombia’s Best Kept Secret in Fashion Is the Latino Architect Who Has Been Running the Met Gala Behind the Scenes for Two Decades

Every year, on the first Monday of May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York becomes something altogether different from what it is the other 364 days of the year, and the man responsible for that transformation has been doing it for two decades without most of the world knowing his name.

Raúl Ávila, a Colombian architect and decorator, has led the design and production of the Met Gala since the early 2000s, directing the team that converts one of the world’s most recognized museums into a fully realized aesthetic experience for the fashion industry’s most anticipated night. The 2026 edition, held this past Sunday under the theme of fashion as art, marked another chapter in a career that began with modest training and an enormous amount of determination.

The Man Behind the Curtain

Ávila arrived in New York with a foundational education in design and built his career alongside industry luminaries including Robert Isabell, eventually cultivating a working relationship with Anna Wintour and Ralph Lauren that would place him at the center of the Met Gala’s creative operation for the long term. His role is not ceremonial. The process begins months before the event, when Ávila sits down with Wintour to define the conceptual direction and map out every visual element that will eventually fill the museum’s galleries, corridors and entrance.

The execution phase is where the scale of the undertaking becomes difficult to fully appreciate. Ávila’s team is responsible for constructing and installing the entire scenic environment inside the museum in under 18 hours, coordinating technical crews and overseeing every aesthetic detail to ensure the space is ready before guests and press begin to arrive. His approach, as he has described it, is built on the intersection of technical precision and a design sensibility defined by sophistication and deliberate simplicity.

Writing on Instagram ahead of the 2026 gala, Ávila reflected on the scope of what his team has built over the years. “It is 2026 and it is officially the first Monday of May,” he wrote. “For two decades, our team has had the honor of turning the dream of the Met Gala into a living stage. It has been a true honor to watch this come to life.”

A Garden, a Moon and Limestone Steps

The images Ávila shared on his Instagram account offered a rare look at spaces and production details that rarely reach public audiences, and they revealed the degree to which the 2026 design represented a departure from previous editions.

The museum’s iconic front steps, which appeared in a solid blue tone with floral accents during the 2025 gala, were reimagined this year as limestone stairs designed to look as though nature had begun to reclaim them, with surface textures and organic detailing that created an entirely different visual impression for guests arriving on the red carpet.

The entrance itself was conceived as a fully immersive garden. Hanging flowers covered the ceiling, dense foliage lined the walls from floor to top, and clusters of white blooms created an atmosphere that suggested an enchanted forest rather than a museum lobby. Potted plants in shades of green and purple reinforced the sensation of moving through a living landscape, and the lighting, kept deliberately soft and warm, worked in combination with the dominant green and violet palette to produce an environment that felt both organic and carefully curated.

The Moon in the Main Hall

The centerpiece of the interior design was a large inflatable moon installed in the main hall, detailed with surface reliefs and textures that replicated the appearance of the lunar surface with enough fidelity to function as a genuine focal point rather than a decorative afterthought. Projectors positioned on either side of the space illuminated the sphere and brought out its texture and volume, integrating the themes of art and nature that defined the overall design concept for the evening.

Ávila shared a time-lapse video of the installation process, documenting the moment the structure rose and inflated inside the hall while his team worked around it, giving followers an accelerated view of the kind of production work that normally happens entirely out of sight.

Hours before the first guests arrived, he posted an additional video walking through the production details for the year. “Every aspect of the Met Gala has to be done to perfection,” Ávila said. “Like the centerpiece table, which is the first thing guests see when they walk in. When I look at a room, I immediately know what I want to do with it. I know what I want to do with the tables, the chairs, the plates. Everything has to be perfect.”

For an event that the world watches and dissects every year, the person making the most consequential decisions about how it looks has spent two decades doing his finest work in the hours before anyone walks through the door.