This morning, fashion leaders including Anna Wintour, Thom Browne, Vera Wang, and Michael Kors gathered for the announcement of the Spring 2026 Costume Institute exhibition. “Costume Art” will debut on May 10, 2026, and inaugurate the Met’s new 12,000-square-foot space dedicated to the fashion department.
Designed by the Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team Peterson Rich Office (PRO), the new Condé M. Nast gallery, named for the late founder of the media company, will be on the ground floor off of the Great Hall.
“It’s so momentous for our department,” the Costume Institute’s Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton told me after the press conference. “It’s a recognition of the work we’ve all done over the years. Fashion is so central to the museum. It’s the only art form that connects every single department and gallery in the museum. There’s not one gallery in which dressing the body isn’t represented. So, it makes sense that this art form that’s common to everybody in the street has this central place in the museum. It’s a recognition both of fashion—the role of fashion within the Met, but also the role of fashion within culture and art.”
Curator Andrew Bolton delivering remarks at The Met’s Costume Art press conference Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni.
As for the exhibition, “Costume Art” will feature artworks from across the Met’s collections in dialogue with garments from The Costume Institute. The exhibition’s main sponsors are Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, with additional support by Saint Laurent and Condé Nast. The press materials state that the show will focus “primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present” and that it will be organized into a “series of thematic body types that reflect their ubiquity and endurance through time and space.”
“’Costume Art’ will present a dynamic and scholarly conversation between garments from The Costume Institute and an array of artworks from across The Met’s vast collection,” said the museum’s director Max Hollein, “elevating universal and timeless themes while bringing forward new ideas and ways of seeing.”
The event took place in the Met’s Patio from the Castle of Vélez Blanco, a soaring 16th-century Spanish Renaissance courtyard carved from luminous Macael marble. Once the heart of an Andalusian fortress, later reinstalled in a financier’s mansion, and eventually gifted to the museum, the space still radiates transported grandeur—arcades, mythic carvings, and a cloistered stillness that make it one of the Met’s most dramatic interiors.
(L) Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (ca. 1936). © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (R) Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Ensemble, fall/winter 2017–18. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A sampling of what was in store was on display, including Rei Kawakubo’s autumn/winter 2017–18 Comme des Garçons ensemble, which would bulbously distort the wearer, positioned next to Hans Bellmer’s (ca. 1936). Part of his broader series, Bellmer not only sculpted the uncanny figure but also staged and photographed it, using documentation as an extension of the sculpture itself. With its rounded, swelling forms, the piece even evokes the prehistoric Venus-type fertility totems. Elsewhere, Walter Van Beirendonck’s 2009 spandex bodysuit, which would make anyone look jacked and statuesque, stood guard over a 1503 Albrecht Dürer engraving of Adam and Eve. This just hints at what the show will encompass, and this is a lot to chew on, incorporating the broad history of fashion and art.
Objects from The Naked Body (left) and The Classical Body (right) on display at The Met’s Costume Art press conference. Image: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni
“It was exhausting,” Bolton admitted of putting “Costume Art” together. “Like literally sleepless nights. Sometimes I started from the fashion and sometimes I started from the artwork. What helped was when I began to think about the exhibitions as types of bodies and focusing on particular bodies that we come across in the museum. Some are pervasive, like the ‘Classical Body.’ Some are less pervasive, like the ‘Pregnant Body.’ There could be a hundred more different bodies that somebody else would do and could do.” Other sections are “Naked Body,” “Anatomical Body,” and “Mortal Body.”
But fashion, by its nature, requires a focus on the present. “I wanted it to reflect the diversity that’s happening in fashion,” Bolton explained, “but also the commonality of our lived experience. Half of the show will be focusing on the diversity of bodies. And the other one will be focusing more on the commonality of bodies, what we all share. So skin, aging, dying. I wanted to show the full spectrum of our sort of lived experiences.”
Objects from The Abstract Body on display at The Met’s Costume Art press conference. Photo: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Matteo Prandoni.
One might assume with the brand-new space that Bolton will pull out all the stops for scenography (PRO will also helm that design). “It’s funny because when I look back at something like the Alexander McQueen show [“Savage Beauty”], which I was really proud of, there’s something that seems a little old fashioned about it,” Bolton said. “I’ve always loved doing shows where the scenography carries a narrative of the exhibition. And this particular one, I wanted the opposite. I actually wanted the art to shine and the connections to be sort of what visitors engage with. So in a way, there’s an absence of space. I’ve actually used very traditional sort of exhibition furniture, like pedestals and platforms, but I’ve slightly played with the rhetorical sort of aesthetics behind that. Normally when you go through the museum, pedestals are used to show hierarchy and status and significant value. I’m sort of playing around with what those have meant traditionally within our museums.” It turns out the museum’s vast collections have always had a shared language—the body. Now, they get to show it off.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
