What It’s Really Like to be a Met Gala Greeter and Walk the Red Carpet With Celebs

Some of us might kill for chance to walk Kylie Jenner up the stars of the Met, but it turns out being a Met Gala greeter is much trickier than it looks. And one wrong step could get you fired. Just ask Eugenio Casnighi, an Italian model who was fired right before the 2024 Met Gala and has been giving fans the inside scoop ever since.

Eugenio worked as a Met Gala greeter in 2022 and 2023, carrying purses and helping arrange trains to make sure guests got their perfect shot. He also went viral—a major Met Gala greeter no-no—after he was spotted in one too many pictures of Kylie Jenner walking up the stairs at the 2023 Met. And after initially being hired again as a greeter in 2024, he was let go a few days before the event.

“Basically they said, ‘You made it about yourself, so we can’t have you work there anymore. I’m sorry,’” Eugenio recounted on TikTok at the time. (He has since clarified that he was told his firing was a decision led by the PR team, not Kylie.) Since his original video, Eugenio has continued to speak out about his experience, giving us a rare look at what it’s really like to be a Met Gala greeter.

What does a Met Gala greeter do?

A Met Gala greeter welcomes celebs to the event and helps them walk up the famous Met steps. This can mean a myriad different things.

Sometimes being a Met Gala greeter means carrying a purse and staying a few steps behind the guest. Other times, it means carrying Tyla up the iconic Met stairs because her dress is too tight for her to bend a knee in. (Shout out to those five greeters—four to carry the star and the gown, one to carry the purse—who got her inside safely and in one piece.)

How are Met Gala greeters hired?

Sadly, you can’t just walk into Anna Wintour’s office with a smile and winning personality to book a job at the Met Gala. According to Eugenio, greeters are hired by a third party agency that recruits directly from modeling agencies. “For the first two years that I did it, it was random casting,” he said in a recent interview with Casino.org, per The Mirror. “They select around 10 guys, but it depends on the year. Sometimes they have more, sometimes they have less.”

Sadly, Eugeni0 didn’t expand on what skills greeters were required to have other than being friendly, looking hot enough to be in the background of potential photographs, and being strong enough to help carry someone up the stairs in a pinch.

Greeters don’t know who they’re assigned to until the celebs arrive.

The Met Gala guest list is top secret, so not even the greeters know who they’ll be tending to until they meet on the carpet. “Nobody knows unless you’re, like, one of the people working for Vogue that obviously is in charge of the list. If you’re not that person, you do not know,” Eugenio said in a recent TikTok.

Although Eugenio didn’t go into major detail, his original TikTok video suggests that some greeters are assigned one celebrity for the night. In 2023, he said, he was assigned Kylie. “I help her, you know, like, whatever she needed,” he explained.

They do, however, receive some hints during the training period.

Eugenio previously revealed that greeters get a short, hours-long, training the week leading up to the Met Gala, which includes some basic guidelines for expected behavior, etc, but also some clues as to what famous guest they’ll be dotting on. “They explain your training based on the person you’re going to be assigned to, but they can’t tell you to which person you’re going to be assigned,” he explained to Casino.org. He continued, explaining that in 2024, he suspected he might be accompanying a Kardashian-Jenner on the stage because his training sheet said something akin to “Don’t mention Kanye West.”

No phones allowed.

The first thing they do upon your arrival at the Met Gala as a greeter is take your phone. “You can’t have your phone to record anything inside, you can’t take pictures with celebrities, you can’t do anything with your phone, basically,” Eugenio said. They keep your phone in a secured room, in a lock box. You don’t get your phone until you’re done working the Met Gala.”

NDAs are signed.

In his original video on being fired from the Met Gala, Eugenio claimed that he had signed an NDA to work at the event, but now that he had been fired, “I can say whatever I want now.”

I’m guessing the NDAs are going to be a bit more extensive this year.