A note on this review: Casadi has not yet seen the exhibition in person. This piece describes the show from the museum's published details and the reporting of critics who have, and weighs their arguments. Every judgement below is attributed.
Every spring the Costume Institute's exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art arrives on a wave of red-carpet attention. This year's show carries an extra weight. Costume Art, which runs from 10 May 2026 to 10 January 2027, is the first exhibition in the institute's new Condé M. Nast Galleries, a suite of rooms just off the Met's Great Hall. After eight decades largely in the basement, fashion now greets visitors at the front door.
The critical response has been unusually polarised, and the disagreement is as interesting as the show.
What the exhibition is
According to The New Yorker's Rachel Syme, the new galleries cover nearly 12,000 square feet across five rooms, in space formerly occupied by the museum's main gift shop. The curator, Andrew Bolton, has paired each of roughly 200 garments with a work of art from another Met department. Jed Perl, in The New York Review of Books, notes that the works come from the museum's seventeen curatorial departments.
The organising idea is what Bolton calls "the dressed body". He writes in the catalogue, as quoted by Syme, that bodies throughout the museum's collections are "draped, wrapped, tailored, armored, incised, painted, ornamented, and otherwise fashioned." The show is divided into sections with titles such as "Naked and Nude Body", "Classical Body", "Abstract Body", "Pregnant Body", "Disabled Body", "Aging Body" and "Mortal Body".
Two design decisions stand out in both reviews. Many garments are raised high above their paired artworks, a technique Bolton calls "pedestalizing". And most mannequins have mirrored faces. Syme reports that eighteen unique mannequins were created for the show, modelled on real and imagined people whose bodies do not conform to fashion's conventional ideals: a figure cast from the French model and singer Yseult wears a scaled-up Dior Bar suit, and one cast from the activist Sinéad Burke wears a shortened Burberry trench.
The case for: The New Yorker
Syme's review is the warmer of the two, though far from uncritical. She finds some pairings "quite on the nose", citing a gold Issey Miyake bodice set beside an Etruscan cuirass, and notes that such literal matches risk suggesting that "fashion raids art history rather than illuminating it anew." She also observes that "pedestalizing" works against the clothes, since visitors must crane their necks to see them.
But she finds the show's argument persuasive in its stronger sections. The corsets, panniers and crinolines of "Abstract Body" made her, for the first time, "conscious of being in my own body". Three Comme des Garçons pieces by Rei Kawakubo, set beside earlier sculptures by Max Weber, Henry Moore and Jean Arp, gave her "a disorienting sense" that the sculptors had somehow anticipated the designer. The smaller back rooms, where clothes come down to eye level, she found "by far the more affecting", singling out a folded crimson Yohji Yamamoto dress, a Schiaparelli gown by Daniel Roseberry with buttons styled like Victorian mourning jewellery, and a Thom Browne dress with a beaded skeleton.
Her conclusion is generous to fashion, if not entirely to the thesis: "Is fashion art? Of course it is. But the clothes—the clothes are the thing."
The case against: The New York Review of Books
Perl's review is a broadside. He calls the show "an infomercial for the fashion industry" and describes it as "sterile—a plod". The artworks, he argues, are "generally small and almost invariably overwhelmed by the clothes", presented like "giveaways in an ultra-posh swag bag".
His intellectual objection is that the exhibition never explains how style moves between clothing and art. "What's missing," he writes, "is anything like a lucid account of style as a cultural phenomenon." He takes particular issue with the wall texts and catalogue language, quoting Bolton's description of art "reexamined through the analytic lens of dress" and responding: "I don't know what bothers me more about that word salad—the incoherence or the arrogance." He also points out that more than a hundred of the roughly 200 items date from after 2000, and about a third from after 2020, which he reads as "a show of recent fashion masquerading as a scholarly exhibition".
Perl is not alone. He quotes Alex Greenberger of ARTnews: "Were I an art history professor, I would have no choice but to give this show a failing grade."
The bigger argument: who the galleries are for
Much of Perl's essay concerns the galleries rather than the exhibition. He notes that the space is named for Condé Nast's founder "in recognition of an undisclosed lead gift", that its cost was estimated at around $50 million, covered largely by donors with ties to fashion, and that the exhibition is credited as "made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos." He also raises the inclusion of several garments by Thom Browne, who donated towards the galleries and has one named after him, asking whether anyone worried about "the impression of a quid pro quo". In fairness, Perl reports the Met's position too: the museum has said the Bezoses' involvement is limited to the exhibition, and its leadership argues the galleries will draw new visitors.
Syme frames the same history differently, as a long struggle for legitimacy finally won, noting that five of the ten most visited exhibitions in the Met's history were Costume Institute shows.
Our view
On the critics' evidence, Costume Art is less a coherent argument than a spectacular survey. Its most persuasive passages appear to be the ones that focus on how clothing shapes the body: corsetry, Kawakubo's sculptural forms, the intimate back rooms. Its weakest are the literal pairings and the theory-heavy wall texts.
Where we would gently disagree with Perl is in his sense that fashion's prominence diminishes the museum. A visitor drawn in by a Dior Bar suit (whose origins we explore in our history of the New Look) who wanders on to the Greek galleries has been well served. But his questions about patronage and naming are legitimate and deserve answers.
Should you go?
If you are in New York before 10 January 2027, yes, with expectations calibrated. Go for the craftsmanship and the mannequins that broaden fashion's idea of the body; allow time for the smaller rooms at the end, which both critics single out for different reasons; and read the labels with a sceptical eye.
Several houses represented in the show have profiles on Casadi, including Dior, Burberry and Gucci. For more reviews, visit the Journal.