In 2025, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted its fashion mega-show to the Black dandy and how Black men’s style had shaped our wardrobes, it became a de facto, if perhaps unintentional, act of protest at a moment when overt diversity efforts were being scrutinized by the Trump administration.
Now the museum is quietly wading into the culture wars again.
This week, “Costume Art” opens in the new Condé M. Nast Galleries. It is a clear statement about the enduring relationship between art and fashion. The show is composed of mirrored pairs: generally one piece of art from Impressionism or Ancient Greece or Arms and Armor, to one garment — and proof positive that clothing, or the clothed body, is the single thread linking all 17 departments in the museum. So far, so typical for a costume exhibition.
But sprinkled among the usual sylphlike mannequins in the exhibition are nine new forms of the sort that usually aren’t seen in the fashion departments of any museum. All based on actual people, they include a variety of larger bodies, bodies in wheelchairs, pregnant bodies, trans bodies and bodies that are missing limbs. And atop each body, rather than the usual abstract face, there’s an oval of polished steel so that visitors’ own faces will be reflected back at them, as if they are the person inside all these differently shaped bodies.
“It’s a pretty obvious statement about self-reflection and seeing ourselves in other people’s experiences,” said Aimee Mullins, a model and actress who lost her lower legs as a baby and who posed for one of the mannequins.
The artist Michaela Stark, who is known for binding her own flesh so that it spills over, confronting those who see it with their own idea of what is considered beautiful — and who also posed for a Met mannequin — put it more bluntly: “It institutionalizes the idea that bodies are different.”
Indeed, said Aariana Rose Philip, a Black trans model and another Met mannequin model, “it’s going to show people that the Costume Institute and the Met are making a commitment to inclusivity and diversity, even in times where sociopolitically, it’s being clamped down on.”
The mannequins were the brainchild of Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, who has made it part of his mission to expand the holdings of the department to include significantly more designers of color and ones outside the classic European couture tradition — and to augment the forms on which the clothes are shown.
His mannequin expansion began with the 2023 show, “Women Dressing Women,” which included a representation of Philip as well as one of Sinéad Burke, an activist and the founder of the Tilting the Lens consultancy who was born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism. That form, which was borrowed from the National Museum of Scotland, was a smoothed-out, generic version of Burke’s body. For “Costume Art,” her mannequin was remade in a more physically accurate way.
Otherwise, the difference between then and now is in number, emphasis and the fact that the new mannequins were conceived as permanent holdings of the department, intended to be used in future shows.
Besides Philip, Burke, Mullins and Stark, the mannequin models included Jade O’Belle, the curve model and artist; Charlie Reynolds, a curve model; Antwan Tolliver, the model and founder of the streetwear label Freedom Is Fly, who became paraplegic as a victim of gun violence; Sonia Vera, the model and swimwear designer who was paralyzed as an adult; and Yseult, the singer-songwriter and curve model.
All made their way to a studio in Brooklyn, where they stripped down to their underwear (or, in the case of Stark, a corset and nothing else) and stood patiently as 175 cameras snapped hundreds of images of every part of their bodies in various poses. The images were then “digitally sculpted,” according to the show catalog, into files that were 3-D printed and hand-finished.
By adding these forms to the more classical mannequin collection, “we are trying to complete the picture,” Bolton said. He is hoping to add to the variety of mannequins every year, building a population of forms for the department that echoes the variety of forms in the world outside — and in other parts of the Met.
That may not sound like a big deal, but it is a real change in policy for the department, and one that has the potential to resonate outward.
In the same way that for decades Asian and African dress was treated as textile rather than fashion, and held in those curatorial departments instead of in the Costume Institute, different bodies have always been represented in the museum — but in painting and sculpture, not clothing.
Instead, the fashion department, like all fashion departments, has followed the lead of designers and the runway, depicting the ideal form beneath clothes as a thin, attenuated body. Every year, as visitors admire the garments on display, that custom reinforces the idea that fashion belongs to a specific kind of elite, one defined not just financially, but physically.
For many of the models involved, seeing the new forms is also a deeply emotional experience. This despite the fact that, as Burke pointed out, they are in the minority: Even in the Costume Institute exhibition, they make up only 19 of the 191 mannequins in the show.
“My life’s work in the fashion industry has been wanting disability to be more recognized and more accepted, rather than hidden away,” Philip said. “So to have an opportunity to be a part of art history, to be able to go to my favorite museum and see myself, was a deeply surreal feeling. I cried so many happy tears.”
Still, the result is not necessarily all positive. “There’s a certain element of vulnerability in exposing my body and my art to the kind of widespread audience that the Met attracts,” Stark said, referring to the hate mail and comments she gets, which have forced her to take down her Instagram account on occasion.
The museum has been training its tour guides and the people working at the exhibition to discuss the new mannequins and even the nuances of the language used to describe them.
“People often distance themselves from disability because they don’t want to say the wrong thing, or they don’t want to be embarrassed,” Burke said. “This exhibition is an opportunity to potentially say the wrong thing, to potentially ask those questions and to be engaged by that lived experience.”
Even so, the mannequin models are already bumping up against the limits of their inclusion. “I literally can’t go to the Met Gala,” Philip said of the much-ogled party that is the biggest, starriest cultural fund-raiser of the year. Or, at least, she can’t make a traditional Met Gala entrance.
“The stairs that everybody sees, that all the celebrities climb, are completely inaccessible,” she said.
That is an issue the museum is trying to address. There has always been a photo-op area on the sidewalk in front of the stairs, allowing guests who cannot walk up the steps to strike a pose before they go in via a side door. This year, that space has been expanded, and photographers are largely based in that area rather than higher up on the steps.
But, Philip said, “it’s not the same.”
Stark agreed that the images that come out of the gala matter, especially now. “Who’s on that red carpet and what their bodies are like is a political statement,” she said.
To really inspire change, she said, the party needs at least some “fabulous fat women wearing fabulous gowns.”
“If it is watered down to an Ozempic-fueled event of skinny girls wearing paintings on the red carpet,” she said, “that’s an active denial of what this exhibition is really about.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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