{"id":1918601,"date":"2026-05-04T21:02:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1918601"},"modified":"2026-05-04T21:02:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:02:42","slug":"costume-art-review-mets-costume-institute-needs-a-history-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1918601","title":{"rendered":"‘Costume Art’ Review: Met\u2019s Costume Institute Needs a History Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tAnyone who\u2019s ever taken an art history course knows the drill: put two artworks side by side, and figure out where they intersect and diverge. The exercise involves IDing those objects, stating who made them and why, and accounting for formal innovations across time and cultural differences. Essentially, the discipline is predicated upon a gussied-up game of compare-and-contrast.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCostume Art,\u201d the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s big Costume Institute show for the spring season, attempts to continue the tradition. People will flock to this blockbuster to see rarified dresses in sleekly designed galleries, as they always do. But this time the stars of the show also include artworks from the Met\u2019s collection placed next to the fashion on display. Running the gamut from ancient Greek statues to screenprints by Andy Warhol, the artworks are set beside dresses by designers ranging from Charles James to CFGNY, a collective whose work can also be found in the Whitney Biennial.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis all makes \u201cCostume Art\u201d an anomaly within the history of the Costume Institute. The department\u2019s shows have exploded in popularity over the past decade, in large part thanks to the involvement of former Vogue<\/em> editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who has chaired the Met Gala since 1995. These spectacularly expensive exhibitions are known for their extravagant presentations of gorgeous garments. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren S\u00e1nchez Bezos are listed as the lead supporters of \u201cCostume Art,\u201d having reportedly ponied up an eye-watering $10 million for this year\u2019s edition of the Met Gala. Bezos is currently being protested for his excessive displays of wealth and for Amazon\u2019s role in recent ICE raids.) What these exhibitions are not known for is presenting painting, sculpture, and other mediums in the context of fashion.<\/p>\n

\n\tHere comes \u201cCostume Art\u201d to change all that. Positioned in the center of the Met, in a new set of galleries off the museum\u2019s atrium where the gift shop could once be found, the exhibition is loosely centered around the body and aspires to \u201csuggest that fashion can expand our understanding of what art can mean,\u201d as curator Andrew Bolton put it at Monday\u2019s press preview of the show. Therein lies the problem: \u201cCostume Art\u201d isn\u2019t very good at wringing meaning from art.<\/p>\n

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\"Ancient<\/div>\n<\/div>
Greek and Roman statues in the Met\u2019s \u201cCostume Art.\u201d<\/span>\u00a9Anna-Marie Kellen\/Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBolton and his team placed plenty of artworks in close proximity to garments of all kinds, suggesting artistic dialogue that transcends geographic and temporal boundaries. The dialogue can be resonant when it\u2019s specific, as in the case of a 1997 Jean Paul Gaultier shirt paired with a 1971 drawing by Joe Brainard. Both the shirt and the drawing feature heart-shaped tattoos splayed across male chests (Gaultier\u2019s is accompanied by text reading \u201cSAFE SEX FOR EVER\u201d), and both are bound by the AIDS crisis: Brainard died as a result of complications from the disease, while Gaultier\u2019s design was meant to raise awareness for it. The presentation powerfully situates Brainard and Gaultier within the same lineage of queer artists.<\/p>\n

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\"Two<\/div>\n<\/div>
A section called \u201cAbstract Body\u201d in \u201cCostume Art.\u201d<\/span>\u00a9Anna-Marie Kellen\/Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBut most of the juxtapositions are vague and sloppy. Walk a few steps from the Gaultier shirt, and you\u2019ll find an Ottolinger dress with its sides ripped away. It\u2019s paired with a painting by Adriana Varej\u00e3o, who is representing Brazil at this year\u2019s Venice Biennale. Varej\u00e3o\u2019s painting resembles Portuguese azulejo<\/em> tiles that have been clawed apart to reveal bloody flesh underneath. The artist has described works like this one as metaphors for the violence of colonialism in her home country. And while that much is specified in the exhibition\u2019s wall text, the curators seem more interested in bringing together the painting and the sculpture to draw out a \u201csartorial articulation of trauma,\u201d as they describe it. That\u2019s a pretty limp assessment, especially when you consider that Ottolinger is based in Germany, a nation with trauma of a different variety.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn \u201cCostume Art,\u201d artworks are less objects to be analyzed than props for visual pleasure. A Willem de Kooning lithograph hangs near a Nadia Pinkney coat, seemingly for no reason other than that they both contain splashes of white and black. A painting by Nahum B. Zenil that sets the artist\u2019s face inside a bleeding heart is placed next to a crimson-colored Yohji Yamamoto dress whose pleats are \u201cakin to a pulse,\u201d per an accompanying text. In a section about disability, mannequins in wheelchairs wearing denim by Levi Strauss & Co. and Lou Dehrot\u2014faceless, like all the mannequins in the show, \u00e0 la the creepy protagonist of a recent Pierre Huyghe video\u2014sit beneath a photograph of an elevator taken by Nolan Trowe, an artist who uses a wheelchair. Though the Lou Dehrot jeans were designed specifically for wheelchair users, Trowe\u2019s photograph has no precise relationship to these garments.<\/p>\n

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\"Rows<\/div>\n<\/div>
Pablo Picasso\u2019s The Blind Man\u2019s Meal<\/em> (1903) in a section of \u201cCostume Art\u201d about disability.<\/span>\u00a9Anna-Marie Kellen\/Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tEven when the connections between clothes and art are more explicit, the comparisons are rarely productive. Take the case of a black Gaultier dress that was worn by Nicole Kidman to the 2001 premiere of her film Moulin Rouge!<\/em> The dress is presented alongside a 2004 Adam McEwen painting that purports to be an obituary for Kidman, a co-host of tonight\u2019s Met Gala. Even though Kidman wears the exact Gaultier dress in the image accompanying her faux death notice, the painting may as well not be present at all, since it does little to augment one\u2019s experience of the dress.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt may seem pointless to get too worked up about \u201cCostume Art.\u201d The Met\u2019s other curatorial departments continue to put on rigorous exhibitions on a regular basis\u2014look no further for proof than the museum\u2019s current Raphael show. And Costume Institute exhibitions bring people through the Met\u2019s doors in droves, a valuable asset at a time when the museum\u2019s attendance still has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels. But while most of the Costume Institute\u2019s past shows have not been particularly engaged with art history, this one wants to use fashion to help tell the story of art\u2014and thus needs to be held to a higher standard.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Garments by Issey Miyake, Givenchy, and Yves Saint Laurent, along with an Etruscan breastplate (at lower left), in \u201cCostume Art.\u201d<\/span>\u00a9Anna-Marie Kellen\/Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tCertainly, the show at least needs to do the work of properly setting the artworks within a specific milieu. That seems too much to ask of the curators, who lamely paired such items as an ensemble from the fashion house Ala\u00efa from last year with an Asante-Akan akua \u2019ba<\/em> child figure. The curators note that they trotted out the wood sculpture with a circular face to highlight the curvaceousness of the dress, which they claim was inspired by similar fertility figures. (In fact, a version of the dress was initially presented in a runway show that included sculptures by Mark Manders, which are not included in the Met show.)<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat the curators don\u2019t mention is that akua \u2019ba <\/em>figures have a functional purpose: They serve as aides-m\u00e9moires for family members attempting to recall children\u2014something that is specified on the Met\u2019s website but not in the wall text within the galleries of \u201cCostume Art.\u201d In failing to meaningfully contend with its context, the show veers dangerously close to repeating the mistakes of notorious exhibitions that flatten non-Western artworks into objects meant to be gazed upon.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening wall text for \u201cCostume Art,\u201d the curators write that fashion is \u201ca connective thread linking works across time and place.\u201d It\u2019s curious, then, that the show\u2019s paintings, sculptures, photographs, and drawings don\u2019t get all that necessary context. Were I an art history professor, I would have no choice but to give this show a failing grade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/16.-DisabledBody.jpg?w=1024″] Anyone who\u2019s ever taken an art history course knows the drill: put two artworks side by side, and figure out where they intersect and diverge. The exercise involves IDing those objects, stating who made them and why, and accounting for formal innovations across time and cultural differences. Essentially, the discipline is predicated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1918601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1918601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1918601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1918601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1918601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}