Met Gala Turns the Costume Institute Into a Case for Fashion as Art
The Met Gala arrived this year with a thesis statement. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Costume Institute opened its spring exhibition, “Costume Art,” and the evening’s dress code — “Fashion Is Art” — made the curatorial argument impossible to miss. On the red carpet, guests responded with looks that cited artists, artworks, and visual languages already embedded in art history.
Troye Sivan, dressed in Prada, echoed Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1980 self-portrait in a fur coat. Amy Sherald, whose solo exhibition “American Sublime” opens at the High Museum of Art next week, turned inward by referencing her own “Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)” (2014) in collaboration with Thom Browne. Jon Batiste offered one of the evening’s clearest art-historical tributes, moving from a blue Superman T-shirt and shades that recalled Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People—Bobby Seale)” (1969) to an all-white puffer coat, pants, and cummerbund that brought “Steve” (1976) to mind. Angela Bassett, meanwhile, paid homage to Laura Wheeler Waring’s “Girl in Pink Dress” (1927), a work in the Met’s permanent collection.
The exhibition extends that logic beyond celebrity dressing. Organized around thematic body types — including the Classic Body, the Pregnant Body, and the Anatomical Body — “Costume Art” examines the dressed figure as both subject and surface. Rather than treating clothing as an accessory to the body, the show asks how garments shape the way bodies are seen, read, and remembered.
It also inaugurates the Costume Institute’s new Condé M. Nast galleries, tucked just beyond the museum’s Byzantine displays. The installation begins with a meditation on nudity and the nude, placing garments by Lùchen and Walter Van Beirendonck in dialogue with sixteenth-century engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi and Heinrich Aldegrever. Elsewhere, a veiled silk dress by Maison Margiela is shown alongside Raffaello Monti’s “The Veiled Woman” (1854), while Duran Lantink’s bulbous “Morphing Suit” appears near a Polaroid by Lucas Samaras. Miriam Beerman’s “Bloody Heads Number 39” (1969) is paired with a red crocheted dress by Yuma Nakazato, underscoring the exhibition’s interest in the body as both image and material fact.
“Costume Art” opens May 10 and runs through January 10, 2027, offering a concise but expansive history of dress that moves from early twentieth-century couturiers such as Madame Grès, Madeleine Vionnet, and Mariano Fortuny to contemporary designers including Richard Quinn, Batsheva, and Vetements. The result is less a simple fashion display than a reframing of the museum’s own encyclopedic collection — one that places clothing squarely inside the history of art.
