Met pairs 200 garments with art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring 2026 Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art,” will pair garments with artworks across the museum and open May 10. (metmuseum.org) The Met says the show will juxtapose historical and contemporary fashion from the Costume Institute with objects from other collecting areas to examine “the dressed body.” (metmuseum.org) Curator Andrew Bolton said the exhibition will include about 200 pairings and focus primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present. (metmuseum.org) (news.artnet.com) The pairings are meant to connect clothing to painted, sculpted, and otherwise represented bodies, moving from formal resemblances to political and symbolic readings. (metmuseum.org) The exhibition is also the first show in the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot suite adjacent to the museum’s Great Hall. (metmuseum.org 1) (metmuseum.org 2) That new placement gives the Costume Institute a permanent, central space inside the museum rather than a more peripheral footprint for its spring blockbuster. (news.artnet.com) (artsy.net) The annual Met Gala on Monday, May 4, 2026, will raise money for the Costume Institute and serve as the exhibition’s high-profile kickoff before the public opening six days later. (abcnews.com) (metmuseum.org) The Met says member preview days begin May 5, with timed tickets released April 27 at noon Eastern time. The public run is scheduled through January 10, 2027. (metmuseum.org) The Costume Institute holds more than 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries, and “Costume Art” uses that collection to argue for fashion as an embodied art form inside an encyclopedic museum. (metmuseum.org 1) (metmuseum.org 2) This year’s gala spectacle, in other words, is tied to a museum show with a clear curatorial claim: clothes are being presented not as accessories to art, but in direct conversation with it. (metmuseum.org)