amfAR, the foundation Elizabeth Taylor helped found to fight AIDS in 1985, holds its second London gala at The Chancery Rosewood on Friday 16 October 2026, honouring Philip Treacy and Jeremy Irons.
The Chancery Rosewood holds amfAR’s London gala on Friday 16 October 2026, a single-cause evening for HIV research, set among the many galas of Frieze week.
amfAR was formed in September 1985, from 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 force the subject into rooms that were refusing it, alongside the geneticist Mathilde Krim, who ran the organisation for two decades. It has funded HIV research for forty years and now backs the search for a cure.
The gala is the fundraising instrument that grew out of Taylor’s method, since copied by cause after cause. It puts the money and the visibility in the same room on the same night, and the people who attend understand that turning up is part of what is being donated.
The London gala 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 sits against Frieze and the film festival deliberately, when the city’s art and film money is already in town.