The Dressed Body, Costume Art Gives the Met a New Home for Fashion

Fashion used to live in the basement. For decades the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art worked out of what Time Out calls a basement space, and the people who loved clothes went looking for it. This year the collection came upstairs. Its first show in its new home is called Costume Art, and with the city turning its mind to costumes of every kind this month and the show entering its final three months, now is the time for a walk through.

The exhibition opened to the public on May 10, after the Met Gala on May 4, according to Time Out, and it runs through January 10, 2027, Wallpaper reports. It is the first show in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, a space of nearly 12,000 square feet just off the Great Hall that is meant to be the permanent home of the museum's fashion collection.

Bodies, Plural

The idea is simple and strange. Costume Art looks at what curator Andrew Bolton calls the dressed body across more than 5,000 years of art. About 200 objects from the Met's wider collection hang or stand beside garments from the Costume Institute, so a classical sculpture can sit a few feet from a contemporary gown. Time Out says the show is organized by type of body, including the naked, classical, pregnant, aging, anatomical and mortal.

Walter Van Beirendonck's second-skin ensemble is among the highlights Time Out names, along with an 1870s bustle muslin and sculptural silhouettes. Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, described the show's focus when it was announced last November, as reported by The Fashionography.

Costume Art privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.

It is a nice way of saying that fabric is not an afterthought. A dress is made by hands and it ends up on a body that ages, carries a child or dies. The show keeps that chain in view.

Time Out also notes that the Costume Institute holds more than 33,000 works and that the new galleries came with backing from American designers including Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Thom Browne. Only a slice of that fits on any wall. The choice of which pieces meet which paintings is where the show gets its charge, because the pairings force you to look at both again. A bustle muslin beside a sculpture stops being a historical curiosity and starts looking like a plan for a body.

Faces in the Mirror

One detail sounds like a night-out costume and is not. The mannequins have mirrored faces, made by the artist Samar Hejazi. Bolton said in the announcement that he wanted to bridge the gap between the viewer and the mannequin, and The Fashionography reports he expects the faces to foster empathy and compassion. You walk up to a garment and see yourself in the place where a face should be. In a city of strangers, it lands.

The new galleries are a statement too. Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brooklyn firm Peterson Rich Office designed the space, and they described their aim as "a sense of permanence in a space dedicated to constant change," according to Time Out. Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO, has spoken of objects from across the museum being juxtaposed with garments from the Costume Institute.

Why It Matters After Dark

New York wears its clothes harder at night. A coat that looks ordinary at noon can feel like armor at midnight on Sixth Avenue. The people who build looks for the dance floor and the parade route are working in the same tradition as the designers in the Met's galleries, whether they know it or not.

That connection gets sharper in three weeks, when the Village Halloween Parade takes up the theme Body & Soul. A show about skin, bone, age and mortality is a good primer for a night when thousands of people turn those subjects into costumes.

The Costume Institute was founded in 1937 as the Museum of Costume Art, according to The Fashionography, and was folded into the Met in 1946. The name of the new show reaches back to that first one. It is a quiet bit of history on a wall that otherwise talks about the body.

Go See It

The show closes January 10, so this is its only fall. Check the Met's calendar for current hours before you go. If you have a costume to build for the thirty-first, bring a notebook. Look at the silhouettes, the second skins, the sculptural shapes. Then go home and make something strange.

For another show that makes the city look different at night, read about Scott Kahn's moons at David Zwirner.