Making Space

As The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives the Costume Institute pride of place with new galleries, DODIE KAZANJIAN considers Costume Art, an exhibition that sets art and fashion side by side—and erases any distinctions between the two.

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Fashion is more art than art is”, according to Andy Warhol, who, 39 years after his death, may have the last word. Is fashion art? Is art fashion? The answer to those perennial, pesky questions should be resolved this May when The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, after years in the basement, expands upstairs into prime real estate, just adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall. “In a way fashion is beyond art,” says the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, Andrew Bolton. “It embodies our lived experience. It’s the only art form that does that.”

Fashion will now be at the centre of the museum in what has been The Met's sprawling gift store, between the Egyptian galleries to the north and the Greek and Roman galleries to the south. There, in a home of their own, the Costume Institute’s Condé M Nast Galleries—named for the publisher and bon vivant who made Vogue, Vanity Fair and other magazines into cultural touchstones—will present Costume Art, an exhibition that examines and celebrates the dressed body, featuring clothing and artworks from a majority of the museum's 19 collecting areas.

Max Hollein, the CEO and director of The Metropolitan Museum, calls the new galleries “a powerful continuation” of what the institution has long done. “The Costume Institute is part of our identity. The new galleries don't represent revolution.”

But they were a long time coming, and all the while the audience for fashion has grown dramatically. “The relationship between fashion and art has become less defensive,” says the artist Maurizio Cattelan, one of several artists and curators I spoke to about The Met's new galleries in the course of writing this story. “Fashion no longer asks for permission from art, and art no longer pretends to ignore fashion. They've understood they share the same obsession: the body, power, desire, status.”