amfAR holds its second London gala at The Chancery Rosewood on Friday 16 October 2026, honouring Philip Treacy and Jeremy Irons, timed to Frieze week and the film festival.
amfAR was formed in September 1985, out of the merger of two young research foundations, at a point when AIDS was killing people faster than any institution was willing to say so. Elizabeth Taylor became its founding international chair and used her own standing to raise money and to force the subject into rooms that were refusing it, alongside the geneticist Mathilde Krim, who ran it for two decades. It has funded HIV research continuously for forty years and now backs the search for a cure.
The gala is the fundraising instrument that grew out of Taylor’s method and it has been copied by every cause since. It works because it puts the money and the visibility in the same room on the same night, and because the people who attend understand that turning up is itself part of what is being donated.
The London gala is at The Chancery Rosewood on Grosvenor Square on Friday 16 October 2026. It honours the milliner Philip Treacy with the Award of Excellence and Jeremy Irons with the Award of Inspiration. It is the second edition: the first took the same house in October 2025, the week the hotel opened, and raised $2.1 million. The date is set against Frieze and the film festival deliberately, since that is the week the city’s art and film money is already in town.