Costume Art: Locating the Dressed Body at The Met

31 May 2026, by Jane Francis

In this week's blog, Costume Society member Jane Francis reviews the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual Costume Institute exhibition, Costume Art.

At a moment when large fashion exhibitions increasingly operate as global spectacles, Costume Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2026 Costume Institute exhibition, attempts something both ambitious and intellectually expansive: to position fashion not adjacent to art history, but fully within it. Installed within the newly inaugurated Condé M. Nast Galleries, the exhibition marks a significant institutional shift for the Met and for fashion curation more broadly. Under the direction of Andrew Bolton OBE (Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute), the exhibition proposes the dressed body as a central site through which artistic production, identity, culture and representation can be understood across time.

As the Met describes, Costume Art the show “explores the dressed body across five millennia of artistic production”, positioning fashion within an encyclopedic art historical framework rather than treating dress as peripheral to it. Focused primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present, the exhibition juxtaposes garments from The Costume Institute with a wide range of objects from The Met collection. These pairings present a spectrum of connections and experience: from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, and the playful to the profound. .

The scale of the project is immense. Drawing upon all nineteen curatorial departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Art includes over 400 objects, spanning approximately five millennia of artistic production, juxtaposing garments with sculpture, painting, armour, photography, decorative arts and archaeological artefacts. Bolton frames the exhibition as an attempt to “make the connection between bodies and the clothes people wear” (Bolton, quoted in CBS News, 2026 2), while simultaneously repositioning costume within the broader history of art.

This institutional reframing feels particularly significant. Historically, fashion exhibitions have often occupied a somewhat precarious position within museums, frequently required to justify themselves through spectacle, celebrity or commerce. Here, fashion is granted architectural and conceptual centrality. Speaking about the opening of the new galleries, Bolton remarked that “for an art museum to position fashion in the centre of the building is symbolic” (Bolton, quoted in The Guardian, 2026). The statement resonates throughout the exhibition.

What emerges throughout Costume Art is a sustained argument for fashion as a complex artistic practice rather than a decorative or commercial adjunct to art history. The exhibition repeatedly collapses traditional hierarchies between fine art and dress, positioning garments as objects of conceptual, sculptural and material significance. By placing couture, draping, tailoring and bodily adornment in direct dialogue with painting, classical sculpture and decorative arts, Bolton reframes fashion as a medium through which societies articulate identity, power, spirituality and aesthetics.

The exhibition does not simply argue that fashion resembles art; rather, it proposes that fashion has always participated in the production of cultural meaning alongside other artistic disciplines. The dressed body becomes both subject and site — a living, moving form through which artistic expression is activated. In this sense, Costume Art continues the Costume Institute’s long-standing project of legitimising fashion within museum culture, while pushing that argument further through the encyclopedic reach of the Met itself.

The MET’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries themselves form part of this narrative. Designed by Peterson Rich Office, the approximately 12,000 square foot space sits adjacent to the Met’s Great Hall and constitutes the Costume Institute’s first permanent dedicated galleries. Architecturally the galleries are restrained and atmospheric, allowing garments and objects to emerge through carefully modulated lighting and spatial rhythm. The design avoids the increasingly common immersive excesses of blockbuster exhibition culture and instead creates a contemplative environment in which viewers move slowly between bodies, silhouettes and histories.

The staging of Costume Art  is restrained and classic, possessing a mesmerizing theatricality. Sound moves subtly throughout the galleries — a layered and cinematic soundtrack that ebbs between ambient resonance, breath, movement and orchestral tension. Rather than overwhelming the objects, the soundscape animates them, producing an almost corporeal awareness of presence and absence. Visitors become acutely conscious not only of clothing, but of imagined bodies inhabiting clothing. The mirrored faces of the bespoke mannequins asking the viewer to literally ‘see themselves ‘in the works.

This attention to embodiment lies at the heart of the exhibition’s curatorial thesis. Organised across 13 thematic ‘body type’ sections, the exhibition explores multiple forms of the body: nude, classical, anatomical, ageing, pregnant, disabled, corpulent, adorned, constrained and idealized etc. In doing so, Costume Art attempts to expand the representational limits of fashion exhibition making, moving beyond the historically dominant thin, white, able-bodied mannequin that has so often structured museum display.

Particularly striking is the exhibition’s inclusion of disabled bodies and assistive technologies within its broader exploration of dress and embodiment. Rather than treating disability as a separate or marginal category, the exhibition incorporates difference as integral to the history of dressing the body. This integration feels important and overdue. The effect is not tokenistic inclusion, but a broader destabilisation of normative ideals of beauty and proportion. 

Similarly, mannequins vary significantly in age, scale and bodily form. Pregnant silhouettes, mature bodies and physically diverse figures appear throughout the galleries, complicating fashion’s historical tendency toward exclusionary ideals. In this sense, Costume Art seeks to engage with broader contemporary discussions around representation and visibility, while situating these concerns within a longer historical context.

The juxtaposition of garments with artworks across disparate historical periods occasionally produces startling moments of visual and conceptual connection. A sculptural couture silhouette by Charles James echoes the poised anatomy of a classical marble torso; an anatomical corset converses with Renaissance studies of musculature; contemporary body modification and tattoos by Jean Paul Gaultier appear alongside ancient armour.

The exhibition encourages visitors to read clothing not merely as decoration, but as an extension of the body’s social, political, and symbolic construction. It presents a rich global survey of historic, established, and emerging designers and fashion houses, including... Azzedine Alaïa, Elsa Schiaparelli, Madame Grès, Chanel, Cristobal Balenciaga, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), Iris van Herpen, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Robert Wun , Christian Dior, Walter Van Beirendonck, Yohji Yamamoto, Thom Brown, Telfar, Melitta Baumeister, Dimitra Petsa , Dilara Findikoglu, Richard Quinn, Duran Lantink, Jamie Okuma etc. Too many to name and count! It is fascinating to discover how the body in all its forms inspires and drives the conceptual thinking and materiality of all the designers work.

Some of the most compelling moments occur when the exhibition foregrounds tension and discomfort. A number of objects interrogate bodily restriction, fetishisation and transformation, reminding viewers that fashion’s relationship to the body has never been entirely benign. Corsetry, prosthetics (the iconic Alexander Mc Queen -Aimee Mullins 1999 No.13 Collection look is a standout piece) , tailoring and body shaping devices reveal dress as both liberating and disciplinary. In these moments the exhibition avoids celebratory simplification and instead acknowledges fashion’s complex role in constructing ideals of gender, race and physicality.

Bolton’s curatorial methodology here recalls aspects of earlier Costume Institute exhibitions, particularly Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, both of which positioned fashion within broader cultural and philosophical discourse. Costume Art feels more structurally ambitious, albeit without the contextual grandeur of Fashion and the Catholic Imagination which extended beyond the boundaries of the singular space into the Met Cloisters. Rather than focusing upon a single designer or thematic lens, it attempts to reposition the entire discipline of fashion within the museum’s curated and encyclopaedic framework.

The inclusion of works from all nineteen collecting areas of the MET is central to this ambition. Fashion is no longer isolated within the Costume Institute but placed into active dialogue with global art histories and material cultures. At its best, the exhibition reveals the permeability between categories traditionally separated by museum taxonomy. Clothing becomes sculpture; armour becomes fashion; portraiture becomes evidence of performance and identity. The contemporary and historic fashions draw on a range of artistic inspirations—from Greek molded cuirass armor and carved Roman sculptures to manuscripts, enameled decorative figures, and grand painted canvases. New photography by Paul Westlake of designs by makers such as Madame Grès, Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, and Madeleine Vionnet—some dressed on bespoke mannequins made by scanning real people—reevaluates idealized representations of the human form.

There are, inevitably, moments where the scale of the exhibition threatens conceptual overload. The sheer density of objects and references occasionally risks flattening distinctions between radically different historical and cultural contexts. Some sections feel more fully resolved than others, and the exhibition’s intellectual scope can at times verge on overextension. Following a traditional and known museum format many pieces are behind glass and garments out of reach and difficult to see. I wondered about how inclusive the displays truly were. These moments seem perhaps inevitable within a project attempting to span and connect the MET’S collection of five thousand years of human image making and bodily representation, within a limited space

Importantly, the exhibition also draws attention to the institutional and financial structures underpinning contemporary fashion exhibitions. The Costume Institute occupies a unique position within the Met as the museum’s only curatorial department required to fund itself entirely. Originating as the Museum of Costume Art in 1937 before merging with the Met in 1946 with support from the fashion industry, the Institute has long operated through a complex relationship between scholarship, philanthropy and spectacle.

The Met Gala, perhaps the most visible current fashion event globally, functions as the Institute’s primary fundraising mechanism. Recent figures suggest the 2026 Gala raised a record $42 million toward exhibitions, acquisitions and departmental operations. The opening of the Condé M. Nast Galleries similarly reflects the increasing entanglement of luxury fashion, media sponsorship and museum infrastructure. The term Tech Gala emerged this year from a collective shift in social media discourse, and online opinion pieces.  While such funding enables exhibitions of extraordinary scale and ambition, it also raises ongoing questions about the relationship between scholarship, celebrity and institutional branding.

Interestingly, Costume Art appears aware of these tensions. Despite the spectacle surrounding the Gala itself, the exhibition repeatedly returns to materiality, vulnerability and lived embodiment. The dressed body here is not merely glamorous surface but a site of memory, politics and human experience.

Perhaps most moving is the exhibition’s insistence upon fashion as a profoundly human practice. Across centuries and cultures, bodies are adorned, disguised, constrained, celebrated and transformed through dress and fashion design. Clothing emerges not simply as luxury commodity but as emotional and social language. In locating fashion within broader histories of artistic production, Costume Art ultimately argues for the cultural seriousness of dress without sacrificing its sensual, tactile and aesthetic pleasures.

As visitors exit through the final galleries, one senses the exhibition attempting to shift long-standing hierarchies within museum culture itself. Fashion is no longer peripheral or supplementary. It occupies the center — architecturally, intellectually and symbolically.

The exhibition succeeds not simply because of its extraordinary objects, but because it asks visitors to reconsider the body itself — vulnerable, adorned, political, imperfect and deeply human. 

Accompanying the exhibition is an extensively illustrated and visually rich publication of 420 pages, Costume Art, Authored by Andrew Bolton; Exploring this concept through the lens of age, size, gender, and disability, Costume Art demonstrates how the clothed body is central to artistic expression and representation. The luxuriously designed book features a die cut cover, three specialty papers, debossed details, and metallic silver foils. New assemblages created specifically for this volume by artist Julie Wolfe, composed of photographs by stylist and designer Nathalie Agussol, highlight the connection between art and fashion through collage, overlay, and juxtaposition.
Introduction by Llewellyn Negrin, Epilogue by Andrew Solomon, with contributions by Ayaka Iida, Samar Hejazi, Stephanie Kramer, Miriam Peterson, Nathan Rich, Julie Wolfe, and Tracy Yoshimura, Photography by Paul Westlake, additional photography by Anna-Marie Kellen, Assemblages by Julie Wolfe with photography by Nathalie Agussol.

Costume Art is on display at The Met until January 10th 2027.

While in New York, Jane also visited the Museum at FIT's exhibition Fashion X Art, exploring similar themes to the Costume Institute's annual display. Revisit Jane's review on our blog.