Fashion will soon be front-and-centre at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the institution gets ready to unveil the Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-sq.-ft space adjacent to the Grand Hall, next spring. Plans to turn the museum’s biggest retail space into a new home for the annual Costume Institute exhibition were first revealed in 2023.
“It’s a huge moment for the Costume Institute,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator-at-large, told Vogue. “It will be transformative for our department, but I also think it’s going to be transformative to fashion more generally—the fact that an art museum like the Met is actually giving a central location to fashion.”
The museum will christen the new gallery with Costume Art (10 May 2026-10 January 2027), a show highlighting “the centrality of the dressed body within the museum”, Bolton said in a statement. The exhibition will pair paintings, sculptures and other art objects with historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute, creating artistic and historical dialogues between the institution’s storied collections.
“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” Bolton told Vogue. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and centre in every gallery you come across.”
The more prominent location for the Costume Institute reflects the popularity of fashion exhibitions across museums and at the Met in particular; 2018’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination not only set a record for Costume Institute attendance, but also became the most-visited exhibition in the Met’s history, bringing in more than 1.6 million visitors during its run.
“It’s a major milestone in the development of the Met’s profound involvement and sincere engagement with the history of fashion and its role within the broader context,” Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met, told The New York Times. “For me, it was also a priority to find not only the adequate space for it, but to give it the level of prominence that it requires.”
The Costume Institute’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries will be located just off the Great Hall, the main entrypoint for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fifth Avenue location Photo by 颐园居, via Wikimedia Commons
Costume Art will flout the old-guard curatorial convention of displaying disembodied garments as art objects. “Over the last decade, fashion has gained acceptance as an art form, but its assimilation has been a double-edged sword,” Bolton told the Times, “because it used the rhetoric of art history to elevate it and came at the cost of severing clothes from the body.”
Instead, visual juxtapositions, like a disconcertingly voluptuous 1936 Hans Bellmer sculpture paired with a similarly bulbous 2017 Comme des Garçons dress, make the corporeal case for fashion as an extension of the art-making impulse. The exhibition will be divided by thematic archetypes, such as “Naked Body” and “Classical Body”, alongside overlooked categories like “Ageing Body” and “Pregnant Body”, ensuring a universal resonance with viewers.
Once a stand-alone institution named the Museum of Costume Art before it was absorbed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, the Costume Institute was previously based in a lower level of the museum. The new Condé M. Nast Galleries—named in honour of a gift from their namesake’s publishing company—constitute a professional coup for Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion doyenne who chairs the Costume Institute’s annual blockbuster fundraiser, the Met Gala.
“Because it’s on such a global scale makes people want to come into the museum and maybe see the Sargent show,” Wintour told the Times in reference to the recent John Singer Sargent in Paris exhibition. “The entry point was watching whatever they see on the red carpet.”
The Costume Institute, which is the only curatorial department in the Met required to pay for its own operations, raised a staggering $31m last May. “It’s like having a short run on Broadway when you have a big hit,” Wintour added. “To have our own space that is dedicated to costume is extraordinary.” Wintour, who recently handed the Vogue baton to Chloe Malle, also has her name emblazoned on the institute’s below-ground galleries, which will continue to be used for smaller autumn exhibitions.
The Condé M. Nast Galleries were designed by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brookyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office under the executive auspices of Beyer Blinder Belle Architects. The galleries are said to include new dining and retail spaces. In addition to support from Condé Nast for the new galleries, the first exhibition in the space and next year’s Met Gala are underwritten by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, the journalist Lauren Sánchez Bezos.