The Met Highlights ‘Costume Art’ Show, New Galleries, Met Gala Sponsors

Artistry, accessibility and, of course, money are integral to both art and fashion and the Metropolitan Museum of Art entwined all three in a series of announcements Monday. In doing so the museum encapsulated its future and heritage in equal parts, with a little brand building thrown in for good measure.

This spring’s Costume Institute exhibition will be “Costume Art,” which winks at its founding as the Museum of Costume Art in 1937. That independent entity merged with the Met nine years later with financial support from the fashion industry. The upcoming show will magnify the dressed body — and that means all types of bodies, not just model-worthy ones — by juxtaposing objects from the museum’s collection with a sampling of historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute’s 33,000 items.

Guests at the 2026 Met Gala on May 4 will be among the first to catch a glimpse of the exhibition, which will be staged in nearly 12,000 square feet of new gallery space that will be adjacent to the Great Hall.

The new space, which will be four interconnected areas, is being named for Condé Nast’s late founder Condé M. Nast, who knew how to blend fashion and art, having acquired Vogue when its focus was society. The magazine magnate’s daughter, Leslie Bonham Carter, flew in from London for Monday’s announcement. Condé Nast’s corporate team had a strong showing, led by chief executive officer Roger Lynch, chief content officer Anna Wintour, Vogue’s head of editorial content Chloe Malle and head of human resources Stan Duncan. 

Peterson Rich Office’s Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson are handling the renovations. The Met is not releasing the project’s budget at this stage, a museum spokesperson said.

Condé Nast made the lead gift for the new galleries and the space’s renovations are getting a boost from Thom Browne, Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere, as well as Met trustee Aerin Lauder, Tory Burch LLC, Nancy C. and Richard R. Rogers, and Met trustee Amy Griffin and John Griffin.

The new space’s inaugural show will reflect how fashion is the only art form that connects every gallery in the museum like a “connecting thread,” said the Costume Institute’s chief curator in charge Andrew Bolton. There’s a lot of work to unspool at the Upper East Side museum, given its 17 curatorial departments with art and artifacts that span 5,000 years.

The Costume Institute’s shows are also among The Met’s most popular ones, noted The Met’s Marina Kellen French director and CEO Max Hollein. Some of that interest is inevitably fueled by the Met Gala, the annual benefit for the Costume Institute that funds shows, acquisitions, and more.

Given the public’s interest in the Costume Institute’s shows, the new set-up should also help with crowd control, Bolton said afterward. Vera Wang, one of the designer guests at Monday’s event, said The Costume Institute has created a cultural zeitgeist that brings with it relevance — the one thing that every industry wants. She said, “What’s so amazing is that it has created interest in fashion with people out there who have nothing to do with fashion. It’s not just fashionistas. My in-laws came back to see the ‘McQueen’ show three times, and they were in their late 80s.”

During Monday’s preview, some of the garments and art that will be featured in “Costume Art” were displayed, including a nude spandex knit trompe l’oeil male body motif by Walter Van Beirendonck beside Albrecht Durer’s “Adam and Eve, 1504” engraving. Battista Lorenzi’s marble sculpture “Alpheus and Arethusa” was near an off-white silk tulle dress with pink lace and pink and purple hand braiding from Givenchy‘s fall 2010 haute couture collection by Riccardo Tisci.

Hollein said the upcoming show presents fashion as an important mode of expression of human figures. It definitely illuminates how fashion is visible in paintings, sculpture, and drawings as a means of representation and transformation of the human body, he said.

For Bolton, who is celebrating his 10-year anniversary at the Costume Institute, the recognition of “how important fashion is to our daily lives and obviously to art people” is the most exciting part of the endeavor. “I’m just so happy that we’re able to have a platform to not only show the artistry but also the embodied experience of fashion and how it’s lived,” he said.

Hollein said he could think of no better way to celebrate Bolton’s vision than with the new space, and how it signals The Met’s commitment to expanding and collecting fashion. He also acknowledged Steven Newhouse, who was there with his wife Gina Sanders. Newhouse’s late father S.I., who turned Condé Nast into a media powerhouse, was also cited.

Misty Copeland, who in 2015 became the first African American principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater, spoke of how the body has been integral to her art. “In the art of classical ballet, the body is everything in so many different ways — who you are and what you do are completely aligned. Placement, alignment and strength are always in harmony on or off the stage,” she said, adding that fashion is similar with the body always being the starting point.

“Of course, fashion and art have always held up an ideal body — one that has historically meant thin, white and female,” said Copeland, who added that early on she was made to feel that she didn’t fit that mold.

Moved by Bolton’s focus on not only what makes us different, but also the experience and qualities that we all share, Copeland said the show will lead to the body in all its forms as a work of art that is worth “being seen, elevated, and celebrated.”

The show will be classified in such groups as the “Naked Body,” the “Classical Body,” the “Anatomical Body,” the “Mortal Body,” the “Reclaimed Body,” and the “Pregnant Body.” “Costume Art” and the Met Gala is happening thanks to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos. Additional support is being provided by Saint Laurent and Condé Nast. The show will be open to the public from May 10 through Jan. 10, 2027.

What elevates fashion to an art form is the body, according to Bolton. “In art museums, we tend to take the body out of fashion to focus on its formal qualities,” he said. That is about to change. 

Having been told by journalists [whom she did not name] that fashion is not art, Wang said that dressing the human body is the most challenging art form there is — having done it for 37 years. It is an art form to take a woman or man and try to literally create something on them — not just wedding, ready-to-wear, red-carpet or anything. It’s not easy. It’s not a store dummy or a model — it’s people.”

As a former figure skater for nearly 17 years and a ballet dancer at Balanchine’s School of Ballet, Wang said the body is everything to her and has been her life since the age of 6. “For me, this connection is so logical and natural. And maybe it has not been celebrated enough until now.”

The new galleries near the Great Hall are one of two initiatives with the second one encompassing the activation of the museum’s 83rd Street and Fifth Avenue entrance and re-imagining The Met’s dining and retail spaces including The Met Store. Museum-goers and pedestrians headed to and from The Met have more than museum logos and exhibition information to catch en route on Fifth Avenue. One kiosk now features a photo of a woman wearing its Van Gogh Irises lambswool sweater — another example of fashion on the human form.