November 19, 2025 | 11:07am
MANILA, Philippines — New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that fashion’s biggest night the Met Gala will have a “Costume Art” theme next year.
The “Costume Art’ spring exhibition opening on May 10 — a week after the Met Gala on May 4, the first Monday of May 2026 — will inaugurate the almost 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall.
“It’s a huge moment for the Costume Institute,” curator in charge Andrew Bolton told Vogue. “It will be transformative for our department, but I also think it’s going to be transformative to fashion more generally — the fact that an art museum like The Met is actually giving a central location to fashion.”
Bolton described the upcoming exhibition as one that addresses “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection” with the use of artworks and items across 5,000 years of history represented in the Met.
Specifically, the significance of the body or “the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear,” since for Bolton fashion “has an edge on art because it is about one’s lived, embodied experience.”
He even said that fashion or the dress body is what connects every curatorial department and gallery in the museum,
“It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and center in every gallery you come across,” Bolton continued.
The curator even pointed out that the nude is never naked as it “always inscribed with cultural values and ideas.”
A past art-centric exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” the theme of the 2018 Met Gala, remains the museum’s most-visited exhibition with 1.66 million visitors.
“Fashion’s acceptance as an art form has really occurred on art’s terms,” Bolton explained. “It’s premised on the negation, on the renunciation, of the body, and on the [fact that] aesthetics are about disembodied and disinterested contemplation.”
The exhibit will revolve around three body types: those omnipresent in art like the classical and nude body, those often overlooked like aging and pregnant bodies, and universal ones like the anatomical body.
“The idea was to put the body back into discussions about art and fashion, and to embrace the body, not to take it away as a way of elevating fashion to an art form,” Bolton added.
Condé Nast, fashion brand Saint Laurent, and billionaire couple Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are funding the “Costume Art” exhibit that will run from May 10, 2026 to January 10, 2027.
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