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The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is making a bold claim with its next blockbuster exhibition: that fashion isn’t just adjacent to art history, it’s stitched straight through it.
Announced today at the museum, "Costume Art," the institute's 2026 spring exhibition, will examine the “dressed body” as a constant across more than 5,000 years of global art, pairing roughly 200 objects from the museum’s encyclopedic collection alongside historical and contemporary garments.
“Thinking about this exhibition, it is about objects from across the museum being juxtaposed with garments from the Costume Institute,” said Max Hollein, the museum’s director and CEO, during an official press conference. “The exhibition presents fashion as an important an important and impactful goal of expression of human figure.”
The exhibition will be organized into thematic body types, including the naked body, the classical body, the pregnant body, the aging body, the anatomical body and the mortal body, all structured around how artists and designers have shaped, abstracted or confronted the human form.
The preview made clear just how physical the show intends to be. Garments like a second-skin ensemble, designed by Walter Van Beirendonck, and an 1870s bustle muslin and sculptural silhouettes that “draw attention to the corporeal nature of the body,” according to Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator-in-charge, will stand alongside artworks that echo, mirror or challenge their shapes.
Ballet icon Misty Copeland drove the point home during a press event, reflecting on early career bias that treated her own body as an outlier. “The show makes a powerful case for the body in all its forms as a work of art worthy of being seen, elevated and celebrated,” Copeland said.
That ambitious lens will debut in a brand-new setting: "Costume Art" will also mark the inauguration of the Condé M. Nast Galleries, nearly 12,000 square feet carved out just off the museum’s iconic Great Hall. After decades in a basement space, the Costume Institute’s main events will move to the museum’s front-of-house—exactly where department leaders have long argued they belong. The architectural team led by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brooklyn-based Peterson Rich Office described their aim as creating “a sense of permanence in a space dedicated to constant change,” a connective zone that blends the museum’s historic architecture with a contemporary frame that centers the dressed body.
The Institute’s origins date back to 1937, when it was founded as the Museum of Costume Art, which later merged into The Met. Today, the collection holds more than 33,000 works, “reflecting the breadth and diversity of dress throughout time and around the world,” Hollein said. With the addition of the new galleries, he added, this next chapter arrives with “knowledge and enthusiasm,” and no shortage of donor firepower, thanks to backing from the likes of American designers Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Thom Browne.
"Costume Art" will open to the public on May 10, 2026, following the Met Gala event on May 4, 2026.