When Fashion Meets the Body, Can a Whole Museum Come Alive?
When Fashion Meets the Body, Can a Whole Museum Come Alive?
Claire Marie HealyThu, April 30, 2026 at 12:42 PM UTC
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Unpacking the Met’s “Costume Art” ExhibitionCourtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute
Next week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will open its latest fashion exhibition inside a brand-new gallery space adjacent to the Great Hall. It feels fitting that the exhibition, titled “Costume Art,” will open in this space, which until very recently used to house the museum’s gift shop.
While tote bags, scarves, and silk handkerchiefs emblazoned with Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” Rodin’s “The Thinker,” or Degas’s ballerinas have long been the norm in that store, the new accessibility of the Costume Institute at the entrance of the museum foregrounds a very different relationship to fashion for the average art-hungry visitor. What’s more, its theme asks another question about how we see the position of fashion in culture: that is, if art has long been reproduced in dress, perhaps dress, too, provides a way of bringing the most ancient art and museum objects closer to real life.
After the delicious, dandyish specificity of last year’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style—a show that combined, as the best fashion exhibitions should, the academic rigor of costume history with the deep feeling of personal style as a form of community—this year’s theme may initially read as a little flat, or at least vast. Indeed, Costume Art, proposing the combination of 400 objects from the permanent collection, initially felt to me like the “collections shoot”—when a fashion magazine edits and photographs the best designer runway pieces from all of the seasonal collections—of Met themes: multiple racks of items grouped for no other reason than to usher in a new season. Art as fashion; fashion as art—I love a layered and bold theme, and while this one was sure to generate stunning displays, I wondered if it didn’t serve as a kind of grab bag for the widest possible audience.
What lifts Costume Art out of that possibility is the way curator Andrew Bolton categorized these objects and garments: together, they represent the dressed body. The curation will, he says, “connect artistic representations of the body with fashion as an embodied art form”, a thesis that will guide visitors thematically rather than chronologically, from the “naked body” and the “classical body,” to the “anatomical body” and the “mortal body.”
Clothes are made to be worn; the body is always implicit in the display of fashion in museums. And yet it feels important to be putting the body front and center in the context of clothing right now. In the wider fashion industry, the body diversity conversation has all but stalled after a relative high point in the mid to late-2010s; for my part, I edited a fashion magazine at that time and witnessed an increase in body types on our own and others’ pages that was encouraging. That didn’t stick: according to data from runway analysis platform Tagwalk, 97.6 percent of Autumn/Winter 2026 looks were cast on straight-size models, with plus-size representation dropping to just 0.3 percent; some differently abled models have broken through and are seen on magazine covers, but usually only as part of special themed issues rather than as the norm.
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By going back to the fundamentals of fashion—the place where clothing meets the skin and human shape—Costume Art has the potential to refigure how we encounter fashion in the museum in the first place. Where other fashion shows may organize themselves by chronology, historical period, or the span of an individual designer’s life, Bolton’s curation promises to organize by embodiment. The headless, anonymous store window mannequin was a preoccupation of many early-20th century modernist thinkers for the way it allowed consumers to project themselves onto an idealized self; in Costume Art, mannequins with polished steel heads, as designed by artist Samar Hejazi, invite the viewer to see themselves reflected in different body types and garments. As for the displays, rather than denoting a clear lineage, pairings behave like affinities: a large-bustled 19th-century Charles Frederick Worth gown and SS06 Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga dress come closer under a consideration of how women’s bodies have been abstracted through time (and why); the carved breastplate of a 1st-century Roman marble trophy relief fragment lends a renewed sense of armour to the “pretty” designs of a Maria Grazia Chirui dress for Dior from resort 2026.
Going deeper, and perhaps more effective, are those considerations of bodies that are not strong but fragile. I’m more curious about how expressions of pregnancy, aging, and different ableness will thread in Bolton’s curation. Fashion has always presented a unique opportunity in the arts to explore alternative anatomies, and historic representations of how the feminine body has always been called upon to shapeshift are sure to bring a sense of groundedness to even the most avant-garde contemporary designs. We may not feel close to “wearing” Rei Kawakubo’s infamous “Lumps and Bumps” collection in our daily life, but, much like the curvilinear sculpture her designs will be paired with (by Jean Arp and Henry Moore), one cannot help but look at them in the lived context of how women’s bodies are forged and reforged; both protecting us and betraying us. In an age currently fixated on body modifications and AI-generated models, CostumeArt arrives at a moment when insisting on the lived experience of the body, especially the feminine one, feels more important than ever.
More times than I can remember, I have diverged from my companion on a date to a museum. He’s gone towards, say, Samurai swords and daggers, and I towards late Medieval jewelry. But it strikes me that both these fashion and historical objects share the same problem: removed from use, the challenge has always been to make them feel alive in their glass cases. It seems to me the pairings of Costume Art could also bring back an idea of the psychology of worn-ness to all of these objects; a kind of residue of life, lived, through the emphasis on the body. And in the wider view, by using the body as its organizational structure, and applying it to both art and fashion, it subtly shifts the perceived status of dress in our museums and cultural memory. The idea of the body can help bring us closer: after all, we all have them.
The pioneering fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson wrote in her book Adorned in Dreams (1985) about museum displays of dress being eerie, uncanny, and, somehow, “dead” without the bodies that once animated them. By bringing the body back into fashion in the museum, this new season at the Met may just reanimate some questions we should have never stopped asking of fashion ourselves.
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