Costume Art: Textile and the Body at the Met

In May 2026, The Metropolitan Museum of Art turns its attention to the language of dress with Costume Art, a spring exhibition that places textiles and the dressed body at the centre of its vast collection. Across its new Condé M. Nast Galleries, cloth is treated as both material and metaphor—shaping the body, tracing movement, and holding the imprint of lived experience.

The exhibition’s opening is preceded, as ever, by the Met Gala on May 4, where this year’s dress code, “Fashion is Art,” sets the tone. On the red carpet, garments will circulate as image and spectacle; within the galleries, they return to texture, weight, and construction—grounded in the realities of making and wearing.

“Bustle” muslin, Charles James, 1947. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Staged in newly unveiled galleries adjacent to the Great Hall, the exhibition signals a broader shift in how fashion is positioned within the museum. For Max Hollein, the Met’s director, it reflects a growing commitment to placing dress within a wider art historical conversation. Yet what emerges most vividly is not scale, but intimacy: a renewed attention to the tactile, to fibre and construction, and to the ways garments exist in constant dialogue with the bodies that animate them...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Collage: “Delphos” gown, Fortuny (Italian), Adèle Henriette Elisabeth Nigrin Fortuny and Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo, 1920s. Gift of Frances J. Kiernan, 2005 (2005.328); Terracotta statuette of Nike, the personification of victory, late 5th century BCE. Rogers Fund, 1907 (07.286.23). Artwork by Julie Wolfe. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

All further images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.