The theme for the 2026 Met Gala has been announced It will be “Custom Art” and aims to make fashion an official form of art.

The theme of the next major annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been announced: it will be "Costume Art" and it will open on May 10 next, while the next Met Gala will take place on May 4 next. Beyond celebrating fashion as a form of art, the exhibition will also mark the official inauguration of the Condé M. Nast Galleries, an exhibition space of nearly 1,115 square meters adjacent to the museum's Great Hall. The new space will indeed be the one hosting the exhibition.

Funded by Jeff Bezos and his consort, with additional contributions from Saint Laurent and Condé Nast itself, the exhibition represents a strategic investment to emancipate the Costume Institute from its role as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The event, with the attached inauguration of the new wing, aims to “elevate” the concept of fashion itself to the level of the rest of the museum's art. It is obviously assumed that the whole affair will also revive Condé Nast and the personal brand of the Bezos couple, as well as reaffirm the cultural value of fashion in a year when almost everyone has stopped buying it.

What does the theme of the new Met Gala mean?

The theme of "Costume Art" aims to delve into the theme of the "dressed body" in art from all eras and origins present in the Met's collection. Curator Michel Bolton wanted to explore how the human body and the clothes that cover it, qualifying it, represent the common thread across the various artistic disciplines and eras of human civilization on display at the Met.

So if the exhibition proceeds by pairing archival and contemporary looks with artworks from all eras, we can expect, for the Met Gala, both historical-flavored costumes (and here Jonathan Anderson's new Dior would be spot on) and more conceptual pieces that transfigure the body in a metareflective sense: among the examples mentioned in Vogue's announcement, for instance, there are pieces from the Comme des Garçons' Lumps & Bumps collection and a jumpsuit by Walter Van Beirendonck that reproduces, stylized, the drawing of a naked human body.

We obviously bet right now that the infamous "nude" jumpsuit by Duran Lantink for Gaultier will make its controversial debut on the red carpet. The fact that Saint Laurent will fund the exhibition also makes us suppose that we will see pieces from the Mondrian collection that Yves Saint Laurent created in 1965, the FW66 collection that instead referenced Pop Art, the 1981 Blouse Romaine inspired by Matisse, the 1988 jackets that reproduce Van Gogh, and the jacket from the 1979 collection inspired by Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Nusch Éluard.

However, a very interesting concept is that here we want to overcome the emphasis that, in previous exhibitions, was given to fashion as an object separate from the body that wears it, taken on its own. Here, instead, we want to delve into the indivisibility between the body and clothes, between identity and the clothes that define it. For Bolton, so far, fashion has been considered art as a negation of the body (that is, evaluating the garment almost as a wearable sculpture, separate from the context) while now we want to tell it as the medium through which we construct our identity in society.

What novelties will there be for the Met?

The exhibition, as mentioned, aims to redefine the role of fashion with respect to commonly understood art and it will do so in a new wing of the museum, namely the Condé M. Nast Galleries. The new spaces have been designed by the New York architecture studio Peterson Rich Office and will feature the classic mannequins elevated on high pedestals inside which there will be the artworks with which they are thematically connected.

The artist Samar Hejazi has created mirrored heads for the mannequins with an idea easy to intuit: the viewer "brings" his face to become that of the mannequin. A metaphor for the identification that we want to create between visitors and the exhibition to avoid the dress being simply "hung" without clear references to the human body that wants to wear it. The mannequins, finally, will be casts of real bodies to further avoid abstracting the idea of the human body. The exhibition itself should then be extended to other galleries, leading to a sort of osmosis between the various artistic disciplines.

Takeaways

- The "Costume Art" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art revolutionizes the Costume Institute by inaugurating the Condé Nast Galleries, funded by Jeff Bezos, Saint Laurent, and Condé Nast, and elevating fashion to a form of art on par with the museum's other disciplines.

- The central theme explores the indivisibility between body and clothing, overcoming the traditional separation that has relegated fashion to a detached aesthetic object, to instead celebrate lived identity and empathy through inclusive exhibitions of bodies of all ages and shapes.

- For the Met Gala on May 4, 2026, historical looks and conceptual pieces are expected that will transform the red carpet into a metareflective dialogue between ancient art and contemporary innovation.