Rarely can you talk about fashion without invoking the human form—and at the Costume Institute’s 2026 spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that entwinement comes into sharp focus. Titled “Costume Art,” the show examines the many collisions between clothing and the body, while juxtaposing that interplay against 5,000 years of art history.
What you’ll find throughout the sprawling galleries, then, are pairings of intricately realized couture and artworks depicting the dressed body—to present “fashion as an embodied art form,” as curator Andrew Bolton noted in a statement.
Installation view of “Costume Art” at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: © Anna-Marie Kellen / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A Dolce & Gabbana column dress with a sequined image of Aphrodite, for example, is accompanied by an ancient statuette of the Greek goddess. Too often, these couplings of mannequins and vitrines feel cramped and almost unnecessary. More compelling are those that create organic visual rhymes—such as an ensemble by British designer Harry Pontefract of polystyrene-stuffed hosiery that’s installed alongside Sarah Lucas’s equally bulbous NUD CYCLADIC 9 (2010).
The premise of “Costume Art,” however, comes through in objects that center the physical and the corporeal. To that end, the Met has helpfully divided the show into chapters from the “Nude Body” and “Disabled Body” to the “Aging Body” and “Anatomical Body.” What emerges is how the human form has been site as much as material for generations of artists and designers.
Installation view of “Costume Art” at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: © Anna-Marie Kellen / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Here, we highlight 7 pieces in the “Costume Art” that unpack what Bolton termed the “indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.”
House of Dior, “Bar” suit, 2024
House of Dior, “Bar” suit, haute couture 2024, on view at “Costume Art.” Photo: Min Chen.
Worn by French singer Yseult on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet in 2024, this couture creation by Dior riffs on its iconic New Look silhouette from 1947. But unlike that ensemble, Yseult’s custom outfit of fitted jacket and pleated skirt subverts its predecessor’s hourglass contours, challenging conventional notions around feminine proportion. The Met has paired the piece with an Iranian statuette from 1st millennium B.C.E. that similarly finds liberation in corpulence.
Renata Buzzo, “Corset Anatomia” ensemble, 2025
Renata Buzzo, “Corset Anatomia” ensemble, spring/summer 2025. Courtesy Renata Buzzo. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A standout in “Anatomical Body,” the Brazilian designer’s ode to female anatomy is sewn with foam-filled sculptures representing a woman’s insides, with red silk strings running from her reproductive organs into a skirt of beige tulle. The work transforms the female body into a charged arena of resistance, offering a visceral indictment against systemic violence. To be a woman, it seems to say, takes guts.
John Galliano for Maison Margiela, Ensemble, 2020–21
Second from left: John Galliano for Maison Margiela, Ensemble, autumn/winter 2020–21, and Rafaello Monti, (1884), on view at “Costume Art.” Photo: © Anna-Marie Kellen / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Art historians use the term “wet drapery” to refer to the fabric that appears to cling to the body in Classical sculptures, accentuating the naked form underneath. It’s a device adopted by later sculptors, such as Rafaello Monti, whose The Veiled Woman (1854) is on view here—and reimagined by the likes of Galliano. His nude dress for Margiela is veined with gathered silk, meticulously constructed to perform an uncanny illusion. A veil of silk gauze lends the ensemble its spectral aura.
Michaela Stark, “Fat not Fertile” ensemble, 2026
Michaela Stark, “Fat not Fertile” ensemble, 2026, on view at “Costume Art.” Photo: Min Chen.
The Australian-born artist and couturier has come to the fore for her constructions—and deconstructions—of the female form, often using corsets, ribbons, and other feminine signifiers to upend beauty ideals. The Costume Institute has included several instances of her ensembles, including “Fat not Fertile,” its asymmetrical corset and stockings binding the body to reveal bulges, folds, and one exposed breast. It’s an amplified silhouette, and one that refuses to be contained.
Miyake Design Studio, “A-POC QUEEN” and “A-POC KING,” 1999
Miyake Design Studio, “A-POC QUEEN” and “A-POC KING,” 1999, on view at “Costume Art” at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: © Anna-Marie Kellen / The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara’s A-POC (A Piece of Clothing) project dared to imagine how a large tube of fabric could be outlined with seams and cut to create shapes resembling dresses, socks, hats, and gloves. The Met’s installation positions the A-POC roll as an instrument of mass production as much as “a supple epidermis” poised to clad its wearer—a framing emphasized by the frontispiece of a 17th-century anatomical text, shown nearby.
Walking dress, ca. 1883
Walking dress, American or European, ca. 1883. Photo: Paul Westlake, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This 19th-century confection bears out an almost absurdist evolution of the bustle—one so exaggerated that it appears almost perpendicular to the back. This artificial flounce, often created with cane, whalebone, or metal hoops, was meant to emphasize female sensuality, while denoting the wearer’s economic privilege. The latter was captured by Georges Seurat in his famed A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), a study of which is on view here, in which the bourgeois figure in the foreground is immediately recognizable for her swollen bustle.
Vetements, Ensemble, 2024–25
Vetements, Ensemble, autumn/winter 2024–25, on view at “Costume Art.” Photo: Min Chen.
A hoodie at the Met’s fancy couture show? Groundbreaking. This sardonic outing by Guram Gvasalia features an oversized hoodie with the slogan “I’M RETIRED (This is as dressed up as I get),” paired with a lengthy knit skirt. Included in the “Aging Body” section, it reimagines retirement and aging not as a condition of decline, but as a state of leisure, ease, and even playfulness. Exhibited next to the piece is a photo by Diane Arbus of a pair of retirees at a nudist camp, in case you didn’t get the point.
“Costume Art” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave, New York, through January 10, 2027.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
