The Metropolitan Museum of Art has the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, the Henry R. Kravis Wing, and the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing.
Now it will also have the Condé M. Nast Galleries.
On Monday, the museum announced that the nearly 11,500-square-foot former gift shop off its majestic Great Hall, which in 2023 was designated for the annual spring blockbuster Costume Institute exhibitions, will be named after the founder of the publishing company Condé Nast, in recognition of an undisclosed lead gift from that media empire.
This is a significant achievement for Anna Wintour, the doyenne of the Met Gala and global editorial director of Condé Nast’s Vogue, who is a trustee of the museum and was in charge of fund-raising to pay for the project, which cost an estimated $50 million.
It also represents a step forward in the evolution of fashion at the museum — which in 1946 absorbed the Museum of Costume Art — and reflects the growing primacy of fashion in the culture at large. Over the years, the accessible, often high-minded, Costume Institute shows, along with its Met Gala opening party, have played an important role in bringing attention to the museum.
As a result, the museum is finally putting fashion first. Literally.
“It’s a major milestone in the development of the Met’s profound involvement and sincere engagement with the history of fashion and its role within the broader context,” said Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met. “For me, it was also a priority to find not only the adequate space for it, but to give it the level of prominence that it requires.” (The current Costume Institute space downstairs measures 4,300 square feet.)
Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, said the galleries would be “transformative, not just for the department, but also for fashion more generally.”
Bolton said the new galleries’ inaugural show, “Costume Art,” opening May 10, will pair almost 200 artworks from across the Met with approximately 200 historical and contemporary garments and accessories from the Costume Institute, in an effort to underscore the idea that fashion — long treated as the semi-embarrassing stepchild of painting and sculpture — is the common thread in fine art.
“There are 17 curatorial departments in the Met, representing 5,000 years of art from around the world in six miles of galleries,” Bolton said. “And what connects all those areas is fashion, or more broadly, the dressed body. There’s not a single gallery in the museum in which the dressed body isn’t represented.”
Additionally, the exhibit seeks to repudiate the idea that fashion must be “disembodied,” or treated like an abstraction, to earn its place in the classical museum, Bolton said. This will be illustrated through juxtapositions like a terra-cotta statue of the goddess Nike from the 5th century B.C. alongside a Fortuny Delphos gown from the 1920s; a bulbous, armless 1936 Hans Bellmer sculpture of a torso, “La Poupée,” next to a bulbous, armless Comme des Garçons dress from 2017.
To emphasize the diversity of corporeal forms, Bolton organized the show into a series of thematic physical types, including “Naked Body,” “Classical Body,” “Abstract Body,” and “Pregnant Body.” New acquisitions include pieces from such contemporary designers as Ester Manas and Michaela Stark, whose work challenges thinness as a beauty ideal.
“Over the last decade, fashion has gained acceptance as an art form, but its assimilation has been a double-edged sword,” Bolton said, “because it used the rhetoric of art history to elevate it and came at the cost of severing clothes from the body.”
The fact it is made to be worn should not lessen fashion’s importance, he added. Rather than viewing fashion through the lens of art, Bolton said, the exhibit aims to “reanimate art through association with the body.”
While this idea might seem sacrilegious to some, the show is likely to prove less potentially controversial than this year’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the first Met fashion exhibit devoted entirely to designers of color, unveiled amid a political backlash against D.E.I. It may also generate less debate than 2018’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which put the fabric of faith on display.
The relocation of the galleries, however, is another story. The decision to give the Costume Institute such prime placement is likely to generate some grumbling within the storied Met, given the tradition of rivalry among departments for resources and real estate. Met curators have long privately complained about how the Costume Institute’s starry red carpet on the museum steps eclipses the other exhibitions and scholarship inside.
But Wintour pointed out that the high visibility of the gala and the popularity of costume exhibitions make them a gateway for potential visitors who might not otherwise frequent the Met.
“Because it’s on such a global scale makes people want to come into the museum and maybe see the Sargent show,” said Wintour, referring to the exhibition of the painter John Singer Sargent. “The entry point was watching whatever they see on the red carpet.”
The Costume Institute has always been the only curatorial department in the museum required to pay for its own operating budget, rather than have it included in the broader museum budget, a financial burden that necessitates the gala, which last May raised a record $31 million.
Whether other departments like it or not, Costume Institute shows are among the most popular exhibitions in the Met. Of the 10 most-visited shows in its modern history, half were fashion shows. Number one was “Heavenly Bodies” in 2018 (1.7 million visitors), which bumped the 1978 “Treasures of Tutankhamun” (1.4 million) to second place.
Wintour said Costume Institute shows, which had been spread throughout the museum, were often curtailed by incoming art exhibitions. The new galleries will change that. “It’s like having a short run on Broadway when you have a big hit,” she said. “To have our own space that is dedicated to costume is extraordinary.”
The institute’s below-ground galleries were named the Anna Wintour Costume Center in 2014 and will continue to be used for the smaller fall shows, even as the main events rise — per Wintour’s often-stated wish — “out of the basement.”
Given that Wintour recently handed off her role as Vogue’s editor to Chloe Malle (she remains the global editorial director of all Vogues), the Costume Institute’s commandeering of the new entryway galleries could seem like her effort to leave a lasting imprint.
But Wintour said her longstanding efforts on behalf of the Costume Institute have stemmed from her belief in the subject, in the museum and in the scholarship of its chief curator. “I feel so passionately about the Met,” she said. “It’s not about building a legacy.”
Wintour also succeeded in attracting contributions from the designers Thom Browne, Michael Kors and Tory Burch — among others.
Asked whether the Met’s director saw anything problematic in naming galleries after a media executive, Hollein said, “we also have galleries named after collectors and other substantial figures of New York.
“It doesn’t symbolize being tied to a certain perspective or program,” he added. “The gallery is named after the founder of Condé Nast, not after the company.”
Wintour said she was excited that Nast’s daughter, Leslie Bonham Carter, 95, would attend Monday’s news conference at the Met.
The new galleries, designed by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO) — with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects as executive architect — will also present shows from other curatorial departments, including those that explore the intersection of fashion and art. In addition, the renovation will reinvigorate the Met’s entrance at 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue by adding dining and retail spaces.
The upcoming spring exhibition, on view through Jan. 10, 2027, was underwritten by Jeff and Lauren Bezos, as was the gala. Bezos, who was also a host at the Amazon-sponsored 2012 gala, has long been close to Wintour, who featured Lauren Sánchez Bezos as a bride on a digital Vogue cover this summer, along with a multipage story by Malle on the pair’s wedding, in Venice. (The fact the Bezoses attended the Trump inauguration, while Wintour was a prominent Biden supporter, does not seem to have affected their friendship. “Lauren loves costumes,” Wintour said. “She loves fashion.”) Saint Laurent is the sponsor of the monograph that will accompany the exhibition.
The Met Gala, scheduled for its usual first Monday in May, has yet to announce its celebrity co-chairs, honorary chairs and dress code. But given the costume exhibition’s new pride of place on the ground floor, Bolton said: “We want this to be a massive celebration.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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