Met Costume Institute’s “Costume Art” Puts Fashion in Conversation With the Met’s Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition is built around a deceptively simple idea: place clothing beside art and see what changes. In “Costume Art,” garments are installed next to works from the Met’s collection, making the show an unusual entry in the department’s history and a more explicit experiment in comparison than the Costume Institute typically attempts.
Andrew Bolton, the curator behind the exhibition, said at a press preview that the show is intended to suggest that fashion can expand what art can mean. That premise gives the installation a clear intellectual frame. It also exposes its limits. The Costume Institute has become known over the past decade for lavish presentations of clothing, amplified by the Met Gala’s celebrity machinery and the museum’s appetite for spectacle. Here, the focus shifts from display to argument.
At its strongest, “Costume Art” makes that argument with precision. A 1997 Jean Paul Gaultier shirt is shown with a 1971 drawing by Joe Brainard. Both works feature heart-shaped tattoos across male chests, and both artists died of AIDS-related causes. The pairing is not just visually resonant; it places the two works within a shared queer lineage and gives the room a quiet emotional weight.
Elsewhere, the exhibition is less exacting. An Ottolinger dress with its sides ripped away is paired with a painting by Adriana Varejão, who is representing Brazil at this year’s Venice Biennale. Varejão’s work evokes Portuguese azulejo tiles torn open to reveal flesh beneath, a metaphor for colonial violence in Brazil. The wall text makes that context clear, but the curatorial link to the dress feels more asserted than earned.
Other pairings follow a similar pattern. A Willem de Kooning lithograph hangs near a Nadia Pinkney coat. A Nahum B. Zenil painting is placed beside a Yohji Yamamoto dress. In a disability section, mannequins in wheelchairs wear Levi Strauss & Co. and Lou Dehrot denim beneath a photograph by Nolan Trowe. Elsewhere, a black Gaultier dress worn by Nicole Kidman at the 2001 premiere of Moulin Rouge! is shown with a 2004 Adam McEwen painting presented as an obituary for Kidman. The exhibition keeps reaching for meaning through adjacency, but not every pairing produces a convincing one.
That unevenness is what makes “Costume Art” such a revealing test case. The show is not simply asking whether fashion belongs in a museum. It is asking whether comparison itself can generate insight, or whether proximity alone is too thin a basis for interpretation.
