Karlie Kloss, Feast for the Eyes, New York, Vogue, 2009
Patrick Demarchelier
Staley-Wise Gallery
The 2026 Met Gala, which launches the forthcoming “Costume Art” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, has revealed its dress code. Vogue announced via Instagram that the directive, “Fashion is Art,” will invite guests “to express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” The festivities will take place on May 4th (colloquially known as “the first Monday in May”) under the leadership of co-chairs Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, and Venus Williams. Zoë Kravitz and Yves Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello will serve as co-chairs of the gala host committee, and a larger benefit host committee will include visual artists Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, and Anna Weyant.
“Costume Art” further solidifies a longstanding partnership between Vogue and The Met. It will be the debut exhibition in the museum’s 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, honoring the media conglomerate that owns the magazine. The company provided a significant lead gift for the new galleries, which were designed by Brooklyn’s Peterson Rich architecture firm, with aid from New York’s Beyer Blinder Belle Architects. “The newly designed, state-of-the-art Condé M. Nast Galleries further reflect The Met’s commitment to displaying and appreciating fashion as an art form,” Met Director and CEO Max Hollein said in a statement.
As previously announced, the show will position fashion within the context of 400 objects from The Met’s permanent collection, which spans more than 5,000 years of art. According to Hollein, it “will present a dynamic and scholarly conversation between garments from The Costume Institute and an array of artworks from across The Met’s collection, elevating universal and timeless themes while bringing forward new ideas and ways of seeing.” The exhibition focuses on embodied experiences of fashion and is organized into sections including the “Naked Body,” “Classical Body,” “Pregnant Body,” “Aging Body,” “Anatomical Body,” and “Mortal Body.” Georges Seurat’s 1884 Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” will appear alongside a 19th-century “walking dress,” while 1st–2nd-century and 20th-century sculptures will find high-fashion counterparts by Glenn Martens for Y/Project in collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier and Comme des Garçons, respectively.
Andrew Bolton, The Costume Institute’s curator in charge, shared that “the opening of the new Galleries will mark a pivotal moment for the department, one that acknowledges the critical role that fashion plays not only within art history but also within contemporary culture.”
