With ‘Costume Art’, the Met makes a case for making fashion diverse again
Behind all the brouhaha is a compelling and deeply researched exhibition that elevates the human body to an art form
With all the brouhaha surrounding this year’s Met Gala, you’d be forgiven if you forgot that the glittering soirée helps preserve and maintain one of the most important fashion collections in the world, the Costume Institute. And like the parade of celebrities (Bad Bunny, Beyoncé and – yes – lead gala sponsors Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos) who swanned down a cobblestone carpet, the Costume Institute itself enjoyed its own coming-out party: the inauguration of its sparkling new Condé M. Nast galleries.
‘Costume Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute
The galleries, located in what was the former footprint of the museum’s lobby gift shop, offer 12,000 sq ft of dedicated exhibition space that will allow the Costume Institute to mount more ambitious shows for longer periods of time; it also assertively puts fashion front-and-centre in the Met’s curatorial scope. The occasion, said Costume Institute director Andrew Bolton, ‘marks more than the opening of a new space; it marks a shift in how we understand fashion and, by extension, how we understand art itself’.
Appropriately, the 2026 spring exhibition ‘Costume Art’ aims to establish an irrefutable link between the Met’s 19 different departments and fashion by displaying clothing from the Costume Institute’s holdings alongside some 400 objects from the greater museum collection. As such, ‘Costume Art’ provides a survey of sorts, demonstrating how the dressed body – be it clothed in garments or meaning – is a throughline across 5,000 years of art history. ‘The dressed body becomes a prism through which we view painting, sculpture and photography,’ Bolton said.
Visitors access the new galleries, which were designed by Brooklyn-based practice Petersen Rich, directly from the lobby. A double-height antechamber is dedicated to ‘Costume Art’s’ most basic conceit: the naked body. In one vitrine, 16th-century engravings of the fall of Adam and Eve are displayed alongside an NSFW bodystocking by Walter Van Beirendonck as well as a pair of flesh-coloured undergarments by Andreāamo and Vivienne Westwood, strategically embellished with metallic fig leaves. In another, a 1960s-era breast-baring monokini is juxtaposed with a similarly busty Iranian figurine dating back to 1500 BCE.
From bareness, ‘Costume Art’ delves into garments and the self – beginning with rigid, idealised notions of beauty in a section called the Classical Body and meandering through increasingly diverse ‘historically excluded’ categories like the Corpulent Body, the Pregnant Body and Disabled Body. In one niche, Georgina Godley’s ‘Pregnancy’ dress appears alongside an early 20th-century bronze of a pregnant woman by Edgar Degas. A central plinth in the Corpulent Body section showcases a Georges Braque painting of a full-figured woman carrying a basket of fruit, that’s flanked by an open-breasted yellow gown by Greek-born designer Dimitra Petsa and a body-hugging mesh gown by young Belgian label Ester Manas.
The enclosed cases– positioned just below eye level – encourage onlookers to get closer. Below a gauzy Gucci dress designed by Alessandro Michele embellished with a sparkling uterus applique in the Pregnant Body Section, they’ll be delighted to find an Egyptian carnelian figurine, no bigger than a thumbnail, of a woman with her legs spread-eagle.
A section on the Disabled Body is one of the show’s most compelling chapters. There’s a pair of carved timber prosthetic ‘boots’ designed by Alexander McQueen for Paralympian Aimee Mullins in 1999 alongside a stark black and white photo by John Gutmann depicting a classical sculpture’s truncated legs. There’s a naughty Mickey and Minnie Mouse T-shirt dress designed by Vivienne Westwood for punk fixture Helen Wellington-Lloyd, who was born with dwarfism; a 1975 pair of Levi’s blue jeans designed for wheelchair users; and a mesh ensemble by deaf and queer American designer Justin Dougan-LeBlanc. The section, say the curators, is to present the ‘disabled body as an active site of negotiation instead of a passive object of clinical scrutiny’.
From diverse bodies, the show goes on to delve into universal themes, like anatomy, ageing, and death, via gowns that seem to bleed (take a punctured Robert Wun ensemble); decay (like a glittering Thom Browne skeleton dress) and pulse (as with an anatomical-inspired slip dress designed by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen). It’s a deeply-researched show with a near-overwhelming amount of riches to discover; move through too quickly and you might just miss a Van Gogh or a brilliant idea from an emerging designer.
There’s something hopeful about being surrounded by this plurality of ideas and bodies, an optimism that feels like a comforting throwback in an age of Ozempic, Mar-a-Lago Face and anti-‘woke’ rhetoric. ‘It’s about everybody and it’s about every body,’ insisted Anna Wintour, Met Gala chair and global chief content officer for Condé Nast, the gallery’s principal benefactor.
Is that sentiment at odds with the tech billionaires that would raise $42 million for the Costume Institute and later party in its galleries? That might be an unintended consequence of the entire exercise. After all, as Bolton said, ‘to study fashion is to study ourselves’.
Costume Art is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from 10 May, 2026, through 10 January, 2027.
