Costume Art, the spring 2026 exhibition of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, opened to the public on May 10, 2026 and remains on view through January 10, 2027. Per the museum's announcement of February 23, 2026, nearly 400 objects — garments from the Costume Institute's collection set beside artworks from across the museum — fill about 12,000 square feet of new galleries adjacent to the Great Hall.
The exhibition inaugurates the Condé M. Nast Galleries, a permanent exhibition space for fashion at the Met Fifth Avenue designed by Peterson Rich Office, a New York architecture studio. The Costume Institute, the museum's curatorial department for dress, had previously staged its spring shows in temporary galleries; the new wing of rooms gives fashion a fixed address in the building for the first time.
The show opened six days after the annual Met Gala on Monday, May 4, 2026, held in the exhibition's honor with the dress code "Fashion is Art." The co-chairs were Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour, with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as honorary chairs, per the museum.
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Organized by Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, the exhibition is arranged in thematic sections devoted to the body — among them The Naked Body, The Classical Body, The Pregnant Body, The Aging Body, The Anatomical Body and The Mortal Body — asserting, in Bolton's words, the aim to "unshackle fashion from the belief that it is a modern phenomenon." A companion book by Bolton is published by the Costume Institute and distributed by Yale University Press.
For the city's art public, the stakes are twofold. First, an eight-month run through the holiday season positions the show, like its predecessors, as the museum's crowd anchor across the tourist year rather than a single-season event. Second, and less noted, the museum has said the exhibition will extend to the Met Cloisters in upper Manhattan in the fall, sending contemporary dress into the museum's medieval branch — a programming crossover the announcement itself flagged quietly.