For the first time in its 80-year history, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has a permanent home. “Costume Art,” the department’s spring 2026 exhibition, opened to the public on May 10 and inaugurated the new Condé M. Nast Galleries — a roughly 12,000-square-foot space just off the Great Hall, named for the lead gift that funded it. The show is still on view, running through January 10, 2027, which means there’s a genuine window left to see it before it closes.
Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, “Costume Art” isn’t a chronological fashion survey or a single-designer retrospective — the format the Met has leaned on for shows like last year’s Superfine. Instead, Bolton built the exhibition around a single idea: the dressed body itself, and how clothing has shaped, distorted, idealized or concealed it across centuries. Close to 400 objects are on view, pulling garments from the Costume Institute’s own holdings and pairing them directly against paintings, sculpture, works on paper and decorative arts drawn from across the Met’s encyclopedic collection — a curatorial move meant to argue, literally gallery wall by gallery wall, that fashion belongs in the same conversation as fine art.
A show built around the body, not the decade
The galleries are divided into thematic chapters rather than timelines — among them the Naked and Nude Body, the Classical Body, the Abstract Body, the Aging Body, the Pregnant Body, the Corpulent Body and the Disabled Body. In the Abstract Body section, corsetry, panniers, crinolines and bustles are shown as structural armatures that reconfigured the female silhouette, set against sculpture that plays with the same distortions in stone. Elsewhere, pieces from Glenn Martens’s years at Y/Project and from Jean Paul Gaultier’s archive sit in dialogue with classical statuary in the Naked and Nude Body chapter, making the case that trompe l’oeil fashion — fabric printed or draped to mimic skin, muscle or marble — has always been in conversation with sculpture.
What distinguishes this iteration of a Costume Institute show is its engagement with living, working designers who build for bodies the industry has historically ignored. Bolton brought in London-based designers Sinéad O’Dwyer and Karoline Vitto, both known for cutting directly on and for curvier, non-sample-size bodies, to contribute to the exhibition’s Corpulent Body section — according to the two designers, what they expected to be a routine studio visit from an assistant turned into extended, hands-on conversations with Bolton himself about how their work reframes who gets to be dressed as art.
The galleries themselves are the news
Since the Costume Institute’s founding in 1946, it has never had dedicated, permanent exhibition space of its own — shows have historically been staged in whatever gallery footprint the Met could free up that season. The Condé M. Nast Galleries change that. Designed by architects Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of Peterson Rich Office, the new space sits directly adjacent to the Great Hall, giving the department both a permanent address and, going forward, a consistent architectural identity for future shows the way the Temple of Dendur anchors the Sackler Wing. The naming reflects Condé Nast’s role as lead funder of the build-out, alongside additional support from Saint Laurent.
Tickets and practical details
“Costume Art” is included with general Met admission — there’s no separate exhibition surcharge. As of this fall, standard adult admission is $30 for visitors who don’t live in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut; seniors 65 and older pay $22, students with valid ID pay $17, and children under 12 get in free. New York State residents, along with students from New Jersey and Connecticut, can pay what they wish. A same-day ticket also covers The Met Cloisters uptown. The Met is open daily except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day, with Friday and Saturday hours extended into the evening — worth checking directly on metmuseum.org before a visit, since hours shift seasonally and the Costume Institute galleries can get genuinely crowded on weekends given how much attention the show has drawn since the Met Gala tied to it in May.
With roughly ten weeks left before the January 10 close, “Costume Art” is worth prioritizing over a lot of the seasonal pop-ups competing for the same Fifth Avenue foot traffic this winter. It’s rare for a museum to hand fashion a permanent room next to its Great Hall and build an entire inaugural show around arguing that a corset and a classical marble torso are doing the same work. Go see what that argument looks like in person before the galleries move on to their next exhibition.
