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.

- 

GODDESS DRESSING FROM LEFT: Models Ashley Graham, Bhavitha Mandava. and Devyn Garcia play three graces in The Met's new Condé M. Nast Galleries. Graham's Di Petsa gown evokes the Hellenistic period. while Mandava and Garcia channel ancient charioteers in chiton-esque Tory Burch and Michael Kors Collection dresses. Fashion Editor: Amanda Harlech.

“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 center 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 which 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.”