Met Gala’s 'Costume Art' theme

The 2026 Met Gala will use “Fashion is Art” as its dress code, tying the red carpet directly to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring exhibition “Costume Art.” (metmuseum.org) The gala is set for Monday, May 4, 2026, and the exhibition opens to the public on May 10 at The Met Fifth Avenue, where it will run through January 10, 2027. Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Anna Wintour are listed as co-chairs. (metmuseum.org) The show will bring together nearly 400 objects and place garments beside paintings, sculpture, and other works from across the museum’s collection. The Met said the exhibition examines “the centrality of the dressed body” and the link between clothing and artistic representations of the body. (metmuseum.org) “Costume Art” is also the first exhibition in the museum’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot suite next to the Great Hall. The Met said the space will host the Costume Institute’s annual spring show and, at times, exhibitions from other departments that explore fashion and art together. (metmuseum.org) That physical move inside the museum is part of the point. The Costume Institute has long operated as a fashion department inside an art museum, and The Met says its collection now holds more than 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries of dress and accessories. (metmuseum.org) The department itself began as the Museum of Costume Art in 1937 before merging with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946 and becoming a curatorial department in 1959. Andrew Bolton, who joined in 2002 and became curator in charge in 2016, is now leading the exhibition. (metmuseum.org) Bolton has framed the show as a correction to the way fashion is often discussed in museums. In comments reported by ARTnews, he said fashion has gained art-world acceptance partly by shedding its ties to the body, even though garments are also “material garments to be worn and lived in.” (artnews.com) The Met Gala’s role in that argument is practical as well as symbolic. The museum says the benefit, held every year on the first Monday in May, is the Costume Institute’s primary annual source of funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and operations. (metmuseum.org) The museum has used the gala-exhibition pairing for years, but “Costume Art” arrives with a bigger institutional footprint than most. In 2026, the party on the steps and the show inside the building are being presented as the same idea: clothing belongs in the museum, and not only on the red carpet. (metmuseum.org)