Fashion has always sat uncomfortably in the great art institutions of the West, the question of whether it belonged under the same roof as masterworks and heroic marbles a subject of perennial debate. After all, these creations weren’t hung on a wall or put on a pedestal; they were (cue dismissive sniff) worn. They may have been a part of pop culture, but could they really be classed with high culture?
In London and Paris the answer was to relegate dress to separate museums of decorative arts — the Victoria & Albert and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. And in New York, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art may have swallowed its pride in 1946 and deigned to accept the clothes, it put the new fashion department in … the basement. Talk about a metaphor for museum hierarchies.
This week, however, the Condé M. Nast galleries, a 12,000-square-foot permanent space, is being unveiled for the Costume Institute. The galleries have replaced the former museum gift shop, just to the right of the information desk in the Great Hall. Rather than being hidden below ground, the fashion department is now the first thing people see when they enter the museum.
Shh. Listen. Hear that? It is the sound of 80 years of argument ending.
And it is a reflection of the simple fact that it is now fashion that gets people through the doors of these august — some might say old — institutions. It’s the thing everyone can relate to and comfortably opine on, unlike, say, de Kooning, because, hey, everyone wears clothes.
If in doubt, simply consider that of the 10 most-visited Met exhibitions in modern history, half of them were Costume Institute exhibitions. No other department is represented more than once. Or consider “Costume Art,” the exhibition that opens the new space.
This year’s fashion blockbuster — the one celebrated by the Met Gala on Monday night — “Costume Art” both acknowledges fashion’s role as the new entry point to the museum and makes the case for why the change is long overdue. It’s as if the exhibition were holding out its hand and saying to all who enter, “Hello, let me be your guide to the treasures we have throughout this place.”
The show suggests that fashion — or “the dressed body” — is the essential connective tissue of the 17 different departments and 19 collecting areas of the Met, the one element present in every discipline, no matter what century or art form is under discussion. It does this by pairing approximately 200 garments and accessories with 200 pieces of art borrowed from across the museum’s six miles of galleries.
You see the connection from the moment you enter the soaring new space, through an anteroom just off the Great Hall, dedicated to what is now termed “naked dressing.” Think Dilara Findikoglu’s 2023 sheer dress with strategically placed coils of hair, like Lady Godiva fashion cosplay, paired with an 18th century Venetian bronze nude, the hands strategically placed just like the hair. That’s one way to hook ‘em.
It’s no accident that the entry also includes a double-sided vitrine that houses four mannequins. Two of them face outward toward the grand staircase and wear sheer body stockings, one by Vivienne Westwood and one by Andrea Adamo, each with a silver fig leaf over their nether regions. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, has never been afraid of playing to the crowd.
Created by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the architecture firm Peterson Rich, which also designed the exhibition, the galleries have been conceived to fit seamlessly into the existing semiology of the museum. They are floored in white granite, replete with classic pedestals and platforms, and bathed in a soft glow (since fabric is too fragile to be exposed to daylight, this has been created by recessed uplighting). It’s as if the new galleries had always been there; as if fashion had always belonged.
Rather than dress up the exhibition with fancy scenography, or guest film directors as Bolton has often done in the past, the space allows the interplay between fashion and the rest of the galleries to sit front and center. It is, after all, a relatively straightforward idea: an Issey Miyake molded gold breastplate and a mini-me Etruscan cuirass! A Fortuny pleated Delphos gown and a Greek terra-cotta vase featuring a figure in a pleated gown! A Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons armless felted construction and a stone Henry Moore with the exact same curves.
And really, it’s hard to argue with the connection between Van Gogh’s “Irises” and the Yves Saint Laurent jacket that reproduced that painting in sequins, or the Loewe shirt by Jonathan Anderson that did the same on a feather-festooned couture version of a concert tee.
But such banal relationships are actually few and far between in the show, which is after something deeper and more complicated. There is, thankfully, no Mondrian “Broadway Boogie Woogie” with matching dresses in the exhibition; no Warhol soup cans and Warhol soup can shifts.
Warhol is represented, natch, but by a Richard Avedon portrait of the artist’s bullet-scarred torso, juxtaposed against a Coperni dress, its slashes resected with silver spirals. Even those Van Gogh irises turn out to be linked not just by flowers, but by the mental health struggles of the men who made the works, the way both the designer Chet Lo’s gowns covered in little knit spikes and Picasso’s “The Blind Man’s Meal” reflect the importance of tactile understanding.
Indeed, the organizing principle of the show, rather than chronology, is the body itself: both the kinds of bodies that distinguish us, and the bodily experiences we share. And that is the product of a fairly radical rethinking of how fashion relates to art.
For decades, the justifications for considering fashion as an art form involved denaturing it, separating it from its practical purpose and corporeal reality, and focusing instead on its textile value — embroidery, beading, decoration — or its construction. With this show, Bolton is slyly subverting that idea, suggesting instead that it is fashion’s dependence on the body itself that makes it central to any and all art practices: That the real connective issue between fashion and art is the way in which both are used to challenge and shape perception — of the body, of beauty; of who we are and how we see. Understanding the one helps to understand the other.
That’s why the clothes in this exhibition often sit atop the art, a subtle upending of the traditional status quo that speaks to both Bolton’s thesis and the department’s new status. It’s also why the exhibit layout serves to guide you through a maze of bodily types in its two main galleries, the Thom Browne gallery, and the Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere gallery. Among them are the classical body, the corpulent body, the disabled body, the pregnant body, the inscribed body, the anatomical body and the mortal body.
(The terminology, the product of consultation with different interest groups, can be a little abstruse, but the taxonomy has led to one real change: the creation of mannequins beyond the unrealistically thin and sylphlike.)
You don’t have to get any of this to enjoy the show, of course. It may be less magical than some Costume Institute shows such as 2011’s “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” 2018’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and even last year’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” But it is delightful to happen upon an unexpected treasure, such as a miniature Egyptian Omphale figure that seems to glow from within, or Fred Tomaselli’s 1992 work “Behind Your Eyes,” a life-size male nude with a body built out of pills that the Met acquired in 2019 but that has never been shown. Or, for that matter, to discover the beauty in the blood red venous structures of a Robert Wun gown, like a flayed dress.
The fashion masters (Worth, Vionnet, Kawakubo and so on) are all here, sure, like the old masters, but so are many more names most people will not know. As a sign of what sort of role fashion is going to play in the Met going forward, “Costume Art” is a clear statement of intent.
The last room in the exhibition acts as a bookend to the first, focusing not on nudity, but on skin itself before disgorging visitors into the Byzantine galleries. Anders Bergstrom’s wrenching “Brown Bag Test,” which wrestles with early-20th-century racism and the way skin tones were used for discrimination, is there, along with Christian Louboutin’s set of “Hot Chick” stiletto shoes in eight different shades of nude. Both are set against the backdrop of the original brick and concrete outer wall of the Met, which was hidden when the Great Hall and grand entry staircase were added in 1902.
The wall was uncovered when the gift shop was demolished, and it has been left in its original state, as if to remind you that it, too, has been here all along. It’s just that, like the foregrounding of fashion in art, it took this long for everyone to realize it. Now that they have, there is room for an even more interesting question: What’s next?
Cinematography by Jensen Gore.
Costume Art
Members Preview, May 5, 7-9; opens May 10 — Jan. 10, 2027, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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