“Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, has not arrived without its fair share of controversy.
The accompanying Costume Institute Benefit, known widely as the Met Gala, has this year been sponsored by Lauren Sánchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos, which has prompted some corners of the internet to dub the event the “Bezos gala” and to call for a boycott in retaliation to the couple’s connections with President Donald Trump. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he’d skip the gala, breaking a years-long tradition of New York mayors attending as guests.
And yet, Anna Wintour and the museum’s director, Max Hollein, announced that this year’s gala is expected to have raised $42 million for the Costume Institute, the biggest fundraising draw in history. “Costume Art” inaugurates Condé M. Nast Galleries, named after the founder of Condé Nast, in honor of a substantial gift from the company (which also owns Vanity Fair).
The exhibition itself is one of the best Andrew Bolton, the head curator at the Costume Institute, has mounted. All in all, a momentous year for the Met. Here, VF’s respective art and style correspondents, Nate Freeman and José Criales-Unzueta, break down “Costume Art.”
José Criales Unzueta: Nate, this morning Andrew closed his remarks with a line I loved and I think summarizes his intentions with “Costume Art.” He said: “The history of art cannot be told without the history of dress,” and that “the history of dress is the history of the human body.” Speakers at the press conference all declared the same thing: that fashion is art. I think the show itself says a lot about fashion and its place in history. As our resident art expert, what did you think?
Nate: Yes, Andrew Bolton talked about how he wanted the works of fashion to exist on their own, not in the context of artworks but as artworks themselves. And they do, triumphantly so, as if the “Is fashion art?” conversation is a fait accompli. It’s one of my favorite things about the show. Rather than force the notion, “Costume Art” exists in a world where fashion has always been art, and the pairing can be natural.
There’s no spoon-fed install where it’s like, Look, this painting and this dress have something in common! Everything is complementary, sometimes powerfully, sometimes playfully, and rarely too obvious. I loved seeing the Warhol Skull (donated to the Met by Halston!) in dialogue with a dress from the Noir Kei Ninomiya fall/winter 2026 collection. Ditto Sarah Lucas’s Nud Cycladic 9 (2010) with nylon knit looks from the PONTE fall 2025 ready to wear collection. I swooned over the Comme des Garçons look swarmed with satin rosettes right next to a heartbreaking Anselm Kiefer watercolor and gouache on paper, From Oscar Wilde. So deeply romantic, so grand, just perfect in the space.
