Next Met Gala exhibit will spotlight fashion across art history

NEW YORK (AP):

If there’s been one uniting theme of all the blockbuster fashion exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s the simple idea that fashion is art.

‘Costume Art’, announced on Monday as the next major show at the museum’s Costume Institute – launched by the star-studded Met Gala in 2026 – aims to make that connection more literal than ever, pairing garments with objects from across the museum to demonstrate how fashion has long been intertwined with various art forms.

Max Hollein, CEO and director of the Met, said in an interview ahead of Monday’s announcement that he hopes the exhibit will take visitors to the New York museum on a (very fashionable) journey through art history, where they will see connections throughout.

“It’s a show that can really live in fascinating ways at the museum and can pull from all different areas of our collection – paintings, sculpture, drawings,” Hollein said.

“I hope we all agree that fashion is art,” Hollein added. “But actually I think the exhibition … will make it obvious how fashion is actually happening, so to say, all across the museum and in all different mediums already.”

The new show will examine the dressed body, and will be organised thematically by different body types, according to the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, Andrew Bolton. It will include the ‘Naked Body’ and the ‘Classical Body’, for example, but also less expected themes like the ‘Pregnant Body’ and the ‘Aging Body’.

The connections that will be drawn between artworks and garments will range, curators said in a statement, “from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, the illustrative to the symbolic, and the playful to the profound”.

On hand for Monday’s announcement was Misty Copeland, who recently retired from American Ballet Theatre after a trailblazing career that saw her become the company’s first black female principal dancer. In her remarks, she spoke of the interplay between fashion and dance and said the show makes a “powerful case for the body, in all its forms, as a work of art, worthy of being seen, elevated, and celebrated”.

“Of course, both fashion and dance have long held up an ‘ideal’ body, one that has historically meant thin, white, and female. That bias shaped my own experience,” she said. “Early in my career, I was made to feel that my body didn’t fit the mould. My skin was too dark, my muscles too defined. Being a black woman and a ballerina was presented almost as a contradiction.”

Copeland said she fought to challenge that idea and stood “firmly in the value and beauty of my body, and of the many black and brown dancers whose bodies have so often been overlooked.” The new exhibit – following the lauded ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, which focused on black menswear – adds to that conversation, Copeland said.

It’s also a show that will have a new home. ‘Costume Art’, which opens to the public May 10, will inaugurate new gallery space occupying some 12,000 square feet (1,115 square meters), right off the museum’s Great Hall.

The new Conde M. Nast galleries – created from what was formerly the museum’s retail store – will house not only all spring Costume Institute exhibits to come, but other shows from different parts of the museum.

‘Costume Art’ runs until January 10, 2027. The Met Gala takes place on May 4.