Though I found "Costume Art" to be a somewhat misleading title, this exhibition does explore an incredibly vast subject: "depictions of the dressed body across the MET's vast collection," as described in the exhibition description. The exhibition curates garments as a canvas for what we have wanted to communicate about our bodies: our ideals of beauty, our desire for autonomy and identity, our sense of mortality and corporeality.
The clearest throughline of the exhibition is the pairings of garments with works from across the museum's collections. Garments appear alongside contemporary lithographs, 19th century satirical fashion illustrations, a woodcut from Albrecht Dürer from 1528, a Mesopotamian figure from 5000 BCE, and a plethora of striking anatomical drawings, to name a few. While some pairings were more resonant than others, I found the dialogue between these different mediums energizing. For a museum with collections as remarkable as the MET's, I would love to see even more conversations between departments in future exhibitions.
One of my favorite aspects of the exhibition was the inclusion of twenty-five new mannequins representing a wider diversity of bodies. Many were modeled off of real people of different sizes and abilities using 3d scanning, such as activist Sinéad Burke who was born with dwarfism or plus-size artist Michaela Stark. Pregnant bodies were also represented. Seeing all of these exuberant bodies represented within a field that has so often presented a narrow ideal felt both utterly natural to me and urgently overdue.
Beyond conceptual themes, what I find most rewarding about fashion exhibitions is the opportunity to study such a wealth of materiality and techniques up close. Visiting exhibitions like this has been an integral part of my education as a designer - a place where I continue to learn by observing the interplay of form, technique and material. Looking closely at garments reveal decisions that photographs rarely capture: the weight of a fabric, the precision of a seam, or the subtle engineering hidden beneath the surface.
Below are a few of the details that delighted me most during my visit. If you have the opportunity to see the exhibition yourself, I encourage you to look for these quieter moments of craftsmanship as much as the larger ideas. And if you aren't able to visit, I hope these observations offer a glimpse into the exhibition through the eyes of a designer.
Seiran Tsuno's Out of body, In dress, 2026. Entirely handmade with a 3d pen, this garment, which in fact is not worn but hangs off of the body from the neck, was specially commissioned for this exhibition.
Tsuno explains her work so thoughtfully in this interview with Fondazione ITS: "For me, the body does not always feel natural, or entirely “mine.” I do not think this is limited to illness or disability. In a society where idealized images of the body are so strongly constructed, many people may feel some kind of distance from their own bodies. This interest comes from my own experience of having a fat body since childhood, and from my work as a psychiatric nurse, where I have met people living with mental and physical phenomena that cannot be easily controlled.
I see clothing as a kind of clue for exploring the history of how people have related to their own bodies. Clothing has, in each moment, given a place to bodies that cannot be fully controlled and that continue to change from day to day. For that reason, making clothing is also a way of touching the history of how a person feels their body, how they wish to exist, and how they have related to their bodily sensations and to their body itself."
Ying Gao and Simon Laroche. This dress, spiked with dressmaker pins, moves in response to audio, incorporating microelectronic systems and a microphone. Watch it move here.
This gorgeously colored mezzotint created in 1746, surprised me for its scale (18" by 24") and sensuality even as the female body is radically flayed open. Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty received a royal license for this technique of four-plate color printing and founded the first French illustrated medical journal. These artworks were used for study by both medical students and painters alike.
The beauty of the exhibition's pairings with other museum collections is in discovering treasures such as these! These "lover's eye lockets" were miniature hand-painted watercolor portraits of a single eye, allowing couples to wear discreet keepsakes of their partners. These are likely British from 1840. How exquisite!
I have been dying to see this Thom Browne AW24 haute couture garment in person, so I was absolutely psyched to see it in the show. This "Muscle Dress" took 2,272 hours to make and 30 artisans using around 200,000 micro bugle beads. The embroidered half is buttoned to another half that represents the inner workings of a tailored garment, with exposed padding and binding. An exquisite pairing of the inner body with the inner garment.