An artist has accused Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s spring 2026 exhibition, of displaying and collecting what she has described as a “counterfeit” of her work, without credit or compensation.
In a series of now-viral Instagram posts, the first of which was published on May 11, the London-based sculptor, textile designer, and filmmaker Anouska Samms claimed joint-authorship of Corpus Nervina 0.0, a garment included in the recently opened “Costume Art.” According to Samms, Corpus Nervina 0.0 was inspired by a 2023 piece she created in collaboration with Yoav Hadari for his fashion label, Psycheangelic, titled Nervina.
In the video, Samms claims that she met Hadari during a studio residency at the Alexander McQueen Sarabande Foundation, where he invited her to hand-weave several pieces for his 2023 Autumn/Winter collection, including the Nervina hair dress.
Hadari described their meeting in an interview he gave to Flanelle Magazine in 2023, saying: “I met Anoushka, and I just went into her studio and saw a woven sample on the wall…Part of what makes [Samms’s] work so unique is that she weaves with hair…then we did this art piece together. The ‘Hair Dress’ was super important for me in that collection.”
In 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art expressed interest in acquiring the original hair dress for inclusion in the museum’s upcoming Costume Institute exhibition, according to Samms’s lawyer, Jon Sharples, a commercial intellectual property and art lawyer. The discussion allegedly then shifted toward a remake of the original after Hadari—who now works under his New York City-based atelier Y H Studios—said the piece had suffered water damage, according to Sharples. However, by the end of the year, that agreement had stalled.
When Samms’s lawyer followed up, Andrew Bolton informed her over email that the museum would not be acquiring the hair dress. In an email posted to Instagram by Samms, Bolton writes that a redacted party “assures me that he has explained his reasoning which is unrelated to the museum.” According to comments recently made by Sharples to Artnet News, Hadari then offered the Metropolitan Museum of Art two ensembles of his own design.
When “Costume Art” opened, however, Samms was tagged in a post by the Sarabande Foundation celebrating the garment’s inclusion in the exhibition. The accompanying wall label identifies the dress as a 2025 edition of the original 2023 design, although only Hadari is credited as its creator.
“So you can understand my shock as I was sitting in my favorite cafe last Sunday to realize after being tagged in an instagram post that my design was in fact in the Met,” Samms says in the video. “My collaborator was there, standing next to it at the opening of the gala. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”
In an October 2023 contract, Hadari and Samms delineated the terms of their collaboration, stipulating that “Samms is the sole owner of the intellectual property of the fabric,” a hair-based textile, and that “the term of use for license of the fabric is one year.”
The Met’s wall text accompanying the garment notes that Samms’s textile was not used. Instead, the design is made of “white silk organza hand-embroidered with black and white polyester and cotton tweedyarns, and white silk thread.”
In an Instagram post, Hadari stated that Corpus Nervina 0.0 is “inspired by” his collaboration with Samms. Though when reached for comment, Hadari and Y H Studios contended that Samms’s ownership of the textile fabric does “not extend to the design, name, concept, construction, or creative direction of the Nervina Hair Dress, which were entirely Mr. Hadari’s. …That textile or any of its components (including hair) is not included in the Nervina Corpus 0.0 in any form.”
The Met declined to comment on this story, “out of respect for the artists and their ongoing dispute.” According to Samms, the museum is waiting for the artists to “resolve [their] differences before they take any action.”
In her video, Samms said she was not seeking to “cancel her collaborator,” but rather is “asking The Met, Andrew Bolton OBE, and the acquisition funders to meet their legal and moral responsibilities.”
Her legal representative added: “Anouska would essentially like to be put in the position she would have been in if the acquisition had proceeded as originally envisaged…with credit as the co-creator of the original and payment for her labour to create a remake of the dress faithful to the original collaboration.”
