Recent years have seen the renaissance of the fashion exhibition: alongside the usual major shows at The Met Costume Institute in New York (the spring opening coincides with the annual Met Gala) and London’s V&A, a slew of smaller, niche displays have taken place in museums and galleries around the world. Indeed, across this list of exhibitions to see this spring, there are shows in Durham, Dundee and Antwerp, alongside those in New York, Paris and London, with subjects spanning Elsa Schiaparelli, Helmut Lang, Azzedine Alaïa, as well as the history of the fashion show and the interplay between garment and body.
Running across April and May – with some having just opened, others in their closing weeks – these are the best fashion exhibitions to see this spring, spanning the inspiring, the educational, and the surreal.
‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’ at the V&A South Kensington
There is a long tradition of London’s V&A holding blockbuster fashion exhibitions – in the last decade or so, the institution has hosted Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams and Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion, among others. The latest subject is Surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli, whose work and legacy is explored in the recently opened ‘Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art’. In our review, India Birgitta Jarvis noted that the exhibition reveals how Schiap (as she was known to friends), brought Surrealism to London, a little-known fact that informs the exhibition’s interplay between art and fashion. Elsewhere, current creative director Daniel Roseberry’s work is on display in a series of fantastical tableaux. ‘Elsa’s focus wasn't just on good taste or lifestyle or even beauty, it was more cerebral than that,’ the American designer told Wallpaper*. ‘It was about how the expression of the surreal can create a more intimate connection between art, pop culture and fashion.’
READ: ‘Schiaparelli lived to shock’: V&A’s new show is an homage to the pioneering surrealist couturier
‘The Antwerp Six’ at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp
A rare exhibition on the Antwerp Six – a group of pioneering designers who emerged from the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s – arrives at MoMu Antwerp this spring. More than worth a weekend trip (follow our guide to the Belgian city here), expect not only rarely seen archival pieces from the designers – Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee – but also inspiring ephemera, like a series of show invitations we featured in the Wallpaper* March Style Issue. ‘The Antwerp Six showed how creative people can lift the reputation of an entire city and present it as a place for experimentation, innovation and connection,’ MoMu’s director Kaat Debo told Simon Chilvers at the time. ‘They are respected as artists, as creatives, but also as people who did it their own way.’
READ: The Antwerp Six changed fashion forever. Now, a rare exhibition will chart their influence
28 March 2026 – 17 January 2027. momu.be
‘Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary’ at the Bowes Museum
Though there have been several exhibitions on Vivienne Westwood and her provocative, pioneering career, a new exhibition at Durham’s Bowes Museum offers up some rarely-seen pieces thanks to loans from private collectors. These include Westwood superfan and collector Peter Smithson, who has spent the last 30 years sourcing rare pieces from across the designer’s career (he co-curated the exhibition with curator of fashion and textiles Rachel Whitworth). ‘The best bits from her seminal collections are where she's got that perfect blend of history, art and culture,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘What she does is sew it together seamlessly with that golden thread of storytelling. And that's what I got interested in, unpicking that story.’
READ: A new Vivienne Westwood exhibition portrays the designer through a superfan’s archive
28 March – 6 September 2026. thebowesmuseum.org.uk
‘Helmut Lang: Séance de Travail 1986-2005’ at Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna
There is just a month left to see ‘Helmut Lang: Séance de Travail 1986-2005’, a rare look inside the seminal Austrian designer’s archive, which transformed 1990s style (and, as a result, the way we dress today). It is the first time that the archive has been on display, with Lang himself – who has subsequently left fashion and now works as an artist – donating the objects on display. Alongside garments, photography, film and plenty of ephemera, the main room centres around a floor plan for one of his New York runway shows. Writing about the exhibition for Wallpaper*, Sofia Hallström called it a ‘revelation and a return’ – don't miss it, it's on until May 3 2026.
READ: Inside Helmut Lang’s fashion archive in Vienna, which still defines how we dress today
Until 3 May 2025. mak.at
Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior at the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation
Such has been the success of Fondation Alaïa’s latest exhibition, ‘Azzedine Alaïa and Christian Dior’, that the Parisian institution has extended its run until summer (it will now close on 21 June, 2026). Putting two masters of haute couture in conversation, the Olivier Saillard-curated exhibition demonstrates both designers’ mastery of silhouette and form, while also tracing Dior’s influence on Alaïa (the latter collected 500 Christian Dior designs, which make up the exhibition here). ‘Despite the decades that separate them, formal agreements, colour combinations, similarities in ornamentation and inspiration attest to the reconciliation of fashion and time that these two great couturiers naturally led and governed,’ says Saillard via the exhibition notes.
Until 21 June, 2026. fondationazzedinealaia.org
‘Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show’ at V&A Dundee
In October last year, Wallpaper* took a trip to Basel’s Vitra Design Museum to visit ‘Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show’, which charts the history of the fashion presentation from the silent Parisian salon to today’s heady digital spectacles. Now, the exhibition is heading to V&A Dundee (the Scottish institution is slowly building a reputation for some of the country’s most intriguing fashion exhibitions), for a new version of ‘Catwalk’, which comprises several of the same objects alongside some new additions that nod to runway shows which have taken place in Scotland. ‘Fashion shows are image machines,’ Jochen Eisenbrand, co-curator of the original exhibition, told Wallpaper* last year. ‘They are important because of the images that they create.’
3 April 2026 - 17 January 2027, vam.ac.uk/dundee
‘Costume Art’ at the Met Costume Institute, New York
‘Costume Art’ at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute might be the only exhibition on the list yet to open, but it is by far the most high-profile. That is largely down to the accompanying Met Gala, which – as in previous years – will herald the opening of the latest blockbuster fashion show at the Costume Institute, featuring the usual starry red carpet and big-name co-chairs (this year: Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Vogue’s Anna Wintour). The exhibition itself is set to pair fashion garments with art from the Met’s extensive collection, with a focus on the way the body interacts with a garment (it will ‘illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body but also the complex interplay between artistic representations of the body and fashion as an embodied artform,’ the blurb describes). ‘Costume Art’ will also herald the opening of a vast new home in the Met for the Costume Institute, a 12,000-square-foot gallery next to The Met’s Great Hall, sponsored by the likes of Thom Browne, Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere.
May 10, 2026 - January 10, 2027. metmuseum.org