The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has devoted its new galleries to an age-old question: can clothing be considered a work of art? With Costume Art, featuring 400 pieces and five millennia of dressed bodies, the museum answers without hesitation — while also putting its own certainties to the test through silk, leather and corsets.
The fashion department of New York’s iconic museum has existed since 1937 and long remained tucked away in the basement, far from the main visitor route. The new Condé Nast Galleries, inaugurated on the ground floor of the Metropolitan Museum, quietly change the rules of the game. Fashion emerges from the margins and takes its place at the heart of the museum journey, between the Egyptian antiquities and the Greek galleries.
Fashion comes out of the basement
For decades, exhibitions by the Costume Institute had to be sought out, hidden away in a secondary basement corridor that only the most determined visitors eventually found. This move to the ground floor, across 1,000 square metres reclaimed from the museum’s former gift shop, is the exhibition’s first triumph — before a single dress has even been seen.
The elegant British curator Andrew Bolton, who has headed the department for twenty years, has succeeded in placing his silhouettes on the same level of visitor traffic as the mummies and the Vermeers.
5,000 years of dressed bodies
The exhibition brings together 400 works drawn from the museum’s 17 departments, from medieval armour to Balenciaga tailoring, from Flemish paintings to Greek sculpture. Rather than following a chronological order, the pieces are grouped according to recurring body typologies found throughout the history of visual representation.
Celebrated bodies, invisible bodies and universal bodies: three major chapters span the centuries, from biblical nudes to contemporary questions of body diversity. A 19th-century corset converses with a Greek marble sculpture; a dress by Rei Kawakubo enters into dialogue with a photograph by Hans Bellmer; a 1920s Fortuny gown encounters a classical Greek sculpture.
The bodies long left out of the frame
Nine new silhouettes were created by sculptor Frank Benson using 3D scans of real people, ensuring that each garment is displayed on a body that truly suits it. Pregnant women, trans bodies, people with disabilities and plus-size figures are among the morphologies long absent from traditional fashion exhibition design.
The mannequins’ heads are covered with mirrors, an intervention by artist Samar Hejazi inviting visitors to see themselves reflected in these bodies. These silhouettes will not be dismantled once the exhibition closes; they will join the museum’s permanent collection.
A gala with artistic flair
A few days before the public opening, on 4 May, the museum hosted its annual fundraising gala around the same theme, Fashion is Art, raising 42 million dollars — a record — for the Costume Institute.
On the red carpet, Beyoncé wore a sheer Olivier Rousteing gown adorned with stones evoking Mexican calaveras; Madonna appeared in a Saint Laurent dress inspired by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington; Kylie Jenner arrived as a living Schiaparelli sculpture, nodding to the Venus de Milo. It was a life-sized demonstration that fashion can hold its own in conversation with art without losing its thread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-9r1uKpv8A
Costume ArtUntil 10 January 2027
Open Sunday to Thursday from 10am to 5pm, Friday and Saturday until 9pm, closed Wednesdays
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York
United States
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