The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced its major spring 2026 Costume Institute exhibition, Costume Art, and the inauguration of substantial new gallery spaces. 

Opening on May 10, 2026, the exhibition will explore the centrality of the dressed body by creating a dynamic dialogue between garments from The Costume Institute and artworks spanning the entire history of The Met’s collection—from prehistory to the present. 

To celebrate the opening of the spring 2026 exhibition, The Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala) will take place on Monday, May 4. The event’s co-chairs and honorary chairs will be announced in the coming months, along with members of the Gala Host Committee. 

The Met Gala, held annually on the first Monday in May, is arguably the most coveted and exclusive ticket in the world. For one spectacular night, a select group of global elite—including Hollywood royalty, influential politicians, chart-topping musicians, and cultural power players—ascends the museum steps. The event is a dramatic spectacle where guests peacock their most ambitious, often boundary-pushing, interpretations of the year’s theme

The show will be organized thematically around various body types, highlighting the profound, two-way relationship between clothing and the body. The goal is to reveal how artistic representations of the body are shaped by garments, and how the garments, in turn, are shaped by the bodies they clothe. 

Costume Art will explore a spectrum of thematic body types. It will juxtapose pervasive types—such as the “Naked Body” and the “Classical Body”—with those that have been traditionally overlooked, like the “Pregnant Body” and the “Aging Body.” 

The exhibition also highlights types reflecting shared characteristics, including the “Anatomical Body” and the “Mortal Body.” Through strategic pairings of fashions and artworks, the presentation will reveal diverse connections: from formal to conceptual, aesthetic to political, individual to universal, illustrative to symbolic, and playful to profound. Crucially, objects will be displayed on traditional pedestals and platforms commonly found in art museums. 

However, instead of using these structures to signal value, status, or significance, Costume Art employs them to establish equivalency among different art forms and bodily representations.

The exhibition will be on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027.



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