The Costume Art 2026 exhibition at the Met reveals how fashion interacts with 5,000 years of art, and inaugurates new galleries dedicated to the «dressed body».

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the largest museum institution in North America, will once again place fashion at the centre of the cultural debate with Costume Art, the Costume Institute's spring 2026 exhibition.

Curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition puts forward the idea that, in a museum with over 1.5 million pieces spread across 17 departments, the common thread linking all the works is the «dressed body».

Open from 10 May 2026 to 10 January 2027, the exhibition will serve as a historical, aesthetic, and anthropological exploration of the human body. Bolton defines the exhibition as a celebration of the body's beauty, complexity and diversity in all its manifestations, including its perfections, imperfections, strengths and weaknesses.

 

 

Narratives of the Body: Chapters that Reorder the Canon

The exhibition will be organized into sections that explore different aspects of the body, with the aim of highlighting historically overlooked figures within art and fashion.

One of the curatorial themes will be the dialogue between objects. Among the announced pieces are a 16th-century engraving by Albrecht Dürer alongside a 2009 bodysuit by Walter van Beirendonck — with an explicit call for bodily naturalness — a 'Delfos' dress by Mariano Fortuny in dialogue with a 5th-century BC statuette of Nike, and iconic creations by Charles James, Rei Kawakubo, and Riccardo Tisci that examine textile architecture from contemporary perspectives.

According to Bolton, these combinations represent just a sample of the broad spectrum of connections that will be displayed in the full exhibition.

A new gallery dedicated to fashion will be located in the heart of the Met

Costume Art will also mark the opening of a new 1,115 m² gallery designed by New York studio Paterson Rich Office. This extension will be located next to the Great Hall, more visibly integrating fashion into the museum's main tour.

Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO, believes that this architectural addition reaffirms the institution's mission to strengthen fashion's presence within the museum's global context, consolidating its status as a field of study on par with any historical or artistic discipline.