Beyond Body-Con: In the the Met’s Spectacular New Exhibition, “Costume Art,” the Human Form Connects Fashion and Art

It’s next to impossible to walk through “Costume Art,” the Met’s blockbuster fashion exhibition, as an impassive observer. Active looking is more than encouraged, it’s required because one’s own visage appears in the flat, reflective surface of the faceless mannequin heads created by sculptor Samar Hejazi. The idea, curator Andrew Bolton said, is “to reflect on your own lived experience, hopefully to create a connection, empathy, compassion towards each other.”

Not only does this interactive element transform a visit to the museum into a small voyage of self discovery, but it is a bodily experience that cannot be replicated digitally. This at a time when humans are being replaced by machines and AI anxiety is pervasive.

Bolton—the man who a decade ago dreamed up “Manus x Machina,” an exhibition about the happy coexistence of humans and technology—is once again a step ahead of the rest of us in focusing on physicality and dimensionality in a visual world that favors flatness. After all, what could be more materially foundational than the human form?

“The whole show [is] structured around a typology of bodies, and these are bodies that you see across the museum when you encounter artworks,” Bolton explained. “The simple thesis for the show really is the fact that the dressed body is the connecting thread throughout the entire museum.” What you won’t see anywhere else at the Met are mannequins of diverse body types modeled after named individuals, like those commissioned for “Costume Art.” And this is transformative in many ways. As the scholar Llewellyn Negrin notes in her catalog introduction, not only do mannequins project a beauty standard, but their “dimensions often dictate the sizes of the garments shown, and the garments’ sizes correspond to the idealized proportions of the preferred mannequins, resulting in a mutually reinforcing process that perpetuates the privileging of culturally esteemed body types.”

Before getting into the organization of the exhibition, it’s important to address some of the frameworks around the show, especially regarding fashion’s changing relationship to art. In this age of individuality, where images are the common currency, and keeping up appearances (often through clothing) is a blood sport, interest in fashion has grown and it has become ever more integrated into all aspects of culture. This has affected its standing in the art world in general, and in museums where the subject is a big draw for visitors. Three of the Met’s most attended exhibitions of all time were organized by the Costume Institute, with “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” 2018 holding the number one spot.

Same Date, New Location

With the opening of the new, permanent Condé M. Nast Galleries just off the Great Hall, the Costume Institute’s exhibitions have a beautiful new home. (One of the many benefits of the space is that it allows for longer periods of display.) You might even say that Cinderella has finally made it to the ball—although “Costume Art’s” messages of acceptance and plurality run counter to the fairytale’s idea of a perfect fit being necessary for entry.

Fashion’s association with femininity, and by extension, frivolity, have long distanced it from high art. “There’s always been sort of an inherent sexism around fashion as a discipline,” Bolton said, “but I think . . . the fact that fashion has been sort of excluded from the history of aesthetics [is] because of the proximity of the body.” Also contributing to clothing’s stepsister position is the view, he noted, that it is “something that’s sort of decorative or illustrative or supplemental.” In addition, there is a sort of inherent unruliness attached to garments, which are highly tactile and are completed by (and destined for) the human form, whereas paintings and sculptures are more self-contained and “heady.” The mind/body divide is another truism Bolton wants to invert.

In the past, the Costume Institute has extended its reach by showing in disparate parts of the museum, as when, in 2022, the American Wing was the stage for “In America: An Anthology of Fashion.” Now, for the inaugural exhibition in the new space, Bolton and his team have taken on the role of hosts. Objects of art from across all of the Met’s collecting areas are displayed alongside garments in “Costume Art.”

“Whenever you go to exhibitions where art and fashion are in juxtaposition of each other, you’re always encouraged to see fashion through the lens of art, which becomes a much more disembodied experience,” Bolton observed. “And what I wanted to do was simple, but I think radical, was to sort of shift that on its head so that you actually look at the artwork through the lens of fashion,” Bolton explained. “We’re not creating a new hierarchy, we’re just trying to create more of an equitability between artworks and bodies. So when you go to the museum, there’s an equitability between the sculpture, the painting, the garment, and between the classic body and the disabled body.”

“We’re not creating a new hierarchy, we’re just trying to create more of an equitability between artworks and bodies.”

ANDREW BOLTON, CURATOR IN CHARGE

Ground Rules

Now that we’ve established Bolton’s prescience in the focusing on the human body as a connector between art and fashion at a time when technology threatens to devalue and displace people (though this was not his stated aim) and we’ve talked about the symbolism in the elevation of the costume galleries from the basement to the Great Hall, we can start our tour of the exhibition.

Polarities abound in “Costume Art.” The overarching one concerns the art/fashion divide and this is explored through what the curator calls body typologies, of which there are two main groupings that deal with form and functionality. The first is, “Diversity in Bodily Being,” a fancy way of talking about difference. It’s here that the Pregnant, Corpulent, and Disabled sections are located. “Bodily Being in Its Universality,” in contrast, considers the very structure of the body (blood, bones, musculature) in regards to the aging and mortality to which every human being is subject.

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Teasing the exhibition is a glass display case that extends from the gallery into the Great Hall, and as this is devoted to the Naked & Nude Body it lends a sort of peep-show aspect to “Costume Art.” The opening section focuses on garments that reveal the body through transparency or actual skin reveals. Representing the former is a pair of skin-tone Vivienne Westwood leggings which reside close to a 1504 Albrecht Dürer engraving of Adam and Eve. Falling into the latter camp is Rudi Gernreich’s taboo-breaking, breast-baring monokini from 1964 and the infamously revealing suspendered Jean Paul Gaultier look in which Madonna revealed what filled her cone-bra at a 1992 AmFAR event to raise money for Aids.

The important takeaways here are two. The first, as set out by Negrin in the catalog, is “The very concept of nakedness can only be understood in relation to the opposing notion of the clothed body.” This suggests that fashion functions as the tempting apple, which changes how we see things. On top of that: we must not equate a nude body as one in a natural state, because, as Bolton, writes: “Even when depicted undressed, the body is never naked, dressed as it is in the physical and cultural ideals of any given time and place.” It embodies the ideals of the time in which it was depicted.

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The most dramatic display in “Costume Art” is devoted to the Classical Body. Standing on raised columns like caryatids on ancient architecture is a line of goddess dresses by the likes of Madame Grès and Fortuny under which glowing vitrines hold Grecian urns, the sort that Keats waxed lyrical about.

Even in 2026 beauty ideals remain mythic, in so much that the balance and proportions which the ancient Greeks and Romans idealized are still what beauty is measured against. Countering the draped pieces that caress the natural lines of the body on display here are armature looks that impose the perfect physique upon a body.

“Because of the proximity of the body [fashion]’s been dismissed as something that’s not worthy of aesthetic contemplation. And I think what the show is trying to say is that, yes, it’s worthy of aesthetic contemplation because of the body, not in spite of it”

ANDREW BOLTON, CURATOR IN CHARGE

A sheer scrim allows the visitor to see from the Classical Body into the next section, which is, Bolton said, “about containing a woman’s body for a particular idea of beauty that was specific to a time and place,” notes Bolton. He calls it the Abstract Body as it demonstrates how the female form has been molded by foundation garments like corsets, hoops and bustles into unnatural shapes. There are many historical garments featured here, including a bustle-back dress which Bolton has paired with George Seurat’s 1884 study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a painting that depicts a woman with such a built out posterior it could do double duty as a side table.

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This section really brings home the way in which fashion has been used to mold and control women physically and aesthetically. It is in part clothing’s association with the feminine that has been at the base of art’s resistance towards dress. Since Eve, it’s the female form that has been the locus of shame, anxiety and fear—fear, Bolton said, of the uncontrollable “leakiness” of women’s bodies.

In our age of sartorial freedom, laws, rather than corsetry boning are being used to contain them. Declining birth rates have dovetailed with restricted access to contraception and abortion in America, for example. Complicating the narrative is the idea that women’s place is the home, a notion that is being adopted, even imposed, by the TikTok phenomenon of tradwifery.

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In contrast, the designers featured in the section dedicated to the Reclaimed Body are defining beauty by their own standards as they clothe Pregnant, Corpulent, and Disabled bodies, which have been marginalized both in the world and museums. Among the clearest examples reclaimed bodies come from Comme de Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo and Duran Lantink, both of whom have padded out the body so that it shape-shifts in bizarre ways, with the exaggerated lumps and bumps unhindered by rules of anatomy. Bolton’s idea here was “celebrating bodies out of bounds,” and he does so with varying degrees of subtlety.

Photo: © Anna-Marie Kellen / The Metropolitan
Museum of Art

A painting by Vincent Van Gogh paired with designs by Yves Saint Laurent and Jonathan Anderson for Loewe.