{"id":386138,"date":"2025-11-17T22:05:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T22:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/386138\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T22:05:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T22:05:14","slug":"the-met-announces-costume-institutes-spring-2026-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/386138\/","title":{"rendered":"The Met Announces Costume Institute\u2019s\u00a0Spring 2026 Exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u00a0
The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a>\u2018s Costume Institute<\/a> is putting form back into fashion\u2014and placing fashion at the forefront of New York\u2019s busiest institution. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Monday, the museum revealed that its spring 2026 blockbuster fashion exhibition will be \u201cCostume Art,\u201d which examines the bond between the dressed body and visual art history. Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, said that that relationship had long been downplayed in the belief that disembodying fashion would elevate it to \u201cart\u201d status.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe Met is putting not only its curatorial weight but its money behind this correction: The exhibition will inaugurate the nearly 12,000-square-foot Cond\u00e9 M. Nast galleries adjacent to the Great Hall, which bears the name of the late magazine magnate in recognition of his company\u2019s lead gift. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition will acknowledge \u201cthe centrality of the dressed body\u201d in the Met\u2019s collection\u00a0by juxtaposing historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute with paintings, drawings, and objects spanning 5,000 years and drawn from the 16 other curatorial departments.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s not a single gallery in the museum in which the dressed body is not represented, making fashion the connecting thread across the 600,000-square-feet of galleries in the museum.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe debate over whether fashion is art is a perennial one, despite the tremendous tourist draw the Costume Institute\u2019s has proven to be, as well as the wealth of criticism that accompanies its marquee exhibition. \u201cHeavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,\u201d the most-visited exhibition in the museum\u2019s history, drew 1.66 million visitors, surpassing even \u201cTreasures of Tutankhamun\u201d in 1978, a show of such mythic scale it redefined the notion of a modern museum blockbuster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tEnsemble, Walter Van Beirendonck (Belgian, born 1957), spring\/summer 2009; Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2020( 2020.45a\u2013d) Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen \u00a9 The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto \u00a9 The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOver the last two decades, fashion has increasingly gained acceptance as a subject worthy of the same serious contemplation as that accorded the traditional arts\u2014painting and sculpture,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cFashion\u2019s acceptance as an art form, however, has occurred very much on art\u2019s terms, being premised on its renunciation of all connections with the body. What\u2019s been overlooked is how these garments are experienced by their wearers, not just as visual artifacts to be looked at, but as material garments to be worn and lived in.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBolton has organized the show around a \u201ctypology of bodies\u201d that can be loosely categorized into three categories, including the sinewy nudes ubiquitous in classical art, as well as bodies rarely celebrated in fashion, such as the pregnant or aging. The preview offered a glimpse of the sort of pairings visitors can expect: British designer\u00a0Georgina Godley\u2019s 1986\u201387\u00a0\u201cpregnancy dress,\u201d fitted on a mannequin with a swollen belly, displayed alongside a photograph by Harry Callahan, double-exposed so his wife\u2019s baby bump emerges like a planet\u00a0from the shadow of space, with two moon-like breasts orbiting nearby.\u00a0Bolton, it\u2019s worth noting, said in the press preview that the majority of work shown would be in dialouge from Western art history.
\u00a0
Each designer here has accentuated or uncannied human nature, whether by drawing on art allegory, anatomical imagery\u2014or both. A fitted 2009 jumpsuit by Walter Van Beirendonck from 2009 is adorned with the nude male form, evoking a retelling of the Garden of Eden, in which Adam eats the apple and, in a plausible twist, feels no shame for his newfound nakedness. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tEleanor Harry Callahan (American, 1912\u20131999), 1949; Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991
(1991.1304).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9 The Estate of Harry Callahan; Courtesy Pace\/MacGill Gallery, New York . Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCostume art is a celebration of the body in all of its strengths and weaknesses, its resiliencies and vulnerabilities, its perfections and perfections, its idiosyncrasies and commonalities, its sublime beauty, its wondrous complexity, its glorious and miraculous diversity,\u201d Bolton said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0The Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2018s Costume Institute is putting form back into fashion\u2014and placing fashion at the forefront…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":386139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,184354,1033,171,50558,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-386138","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-costume-institute","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-metropolitan-museum-of-art","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115567311273599937","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}