Every year in New York City, the first Monday of May sees the same cycle. Some of the most iconic outfits are photographed, the rankings are published, the discourse runs for approximately 72 hours, and then, the internet moves on. But the one thing rarely talked about is the actual reason the gala exists at all. At its core, the Met Gala is a fundraiser. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the only curatorial department at the Met that is entirely self-funded, which means the annual gala is not a charitable event. It is the primary mechanism by which the department sustains itself. This year, it raised a record USD 42 million (approx INR 399.5 crore). A single ticket is priced at USD 100,000 (approximately INR 84 lakh) this year. The exhibition that money was raised for — called Costume Art — opens to the public on May 10, and is considerably more interesting than the carpet that preceded it.
The Costume Institute was founded as the Museum of Costume Art, a standalone institution created by theatre designer Aline Bernstein and the fashion publicist Irene Lewisohn in 1937. Later, in 1946, it merged with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the condition that it remain self-funding. For most of its early history, it operated quietly, acquiring garments and staging relatively modest exhibitions. That changed in 1972 when Diana Vreeland (former editor of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue) became a consultant to the department and began mounting the kind of theatrical, opinionated exhibitions that made the Costume Institute internationally significant.
The annual gala, which Eleanor Lambert had established in 1948 as a fundraiser, grew alongside the department's ambitions. Under Andrew Bolton, who has served as curator in charge since 2005, the Costume Institute has produced some of the most visited exhibitions in the Met's history. The 2015 exhibit ‘China: Through the Looking Glass’ attracted 8,15,992 visitors, making it the most attended exhibition in Costume Institute history and the fifth most visited in the entire history of the Met. ‘Heavenly Bodies’ in 2018 surpassed it with 1.66 million visitors, the most attended exhibition the museum has ever staged. Bolton is responsible for Costume Art.
Costume Art examines the dressed body, bringing together garments and works of art from across the museum's vast collection to illuminate the connection between clothing and the body, and the dialogue between artistic representations and fashion as a living art form. This is a more radical proposition than it sounds. Most fashion exhibitions treat garments as objects to be looked at. Costume Art treats them as things that are worn, that interact with a specific body, that change their meaning depending on the form they clothe. Bolton described the show's central argument as a deliberate shift: Rather than prioritising fashion's visuality, which often comes at the expense of the corporeal, Costume Art privileges its materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.
The exhibition features nearly 400 objects spanning centuries of artistic expression, organised into a series of thematic body types. The categories include the Naked Body and the Classical Body, alongside those that have traditionally been overlooked in fashion exhibitions, such as the Pregnant Body and the Aging Body. The Anatomical Body and the Mortal Body explore universal bodily experiences. It is the first major exhibition to actively place the Pregnant Body and the Aging Body within the context of fashion history, which is a more significant statement than it might appear.
The pairings Bolton has assembled are where the exhibition becomes genuinely interesting. A 2022-23 suit by Glenn Martens for Y/Project in collaboration with Jean Paul Gaultier is paired with a first to second century CE marble statue of Diadoumenos. A walking dress from approximately 1883 is juxtaposed with Georges Seurat's 1884 Study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. A 1997-98 ensemble by Comme des Garçons is displayed alongside Max Weber's 1917 Figure in Rotation. A 2023 dress by Dilara Findikoglu is presented with an 1868 mourning brooch by Tiffany and Co. The logic running through all of these pairings is not stylistic similarity. It is a shared conversation about what clothing does to and for a body, across different centuries and different media.
The mannequins throughout the exhibition feature heads with polished steel surfaces, designed by artist Samar Hejazi, that invite visitors to see themselves reflected in the body types and garments on display. The steel heads mean there is no fixed face, no fixed race, no fixed gender assigned to any garment. The visitor's own reflection becomes the wearer.
Costume Art is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027. Admission is included with a general museum ticket. The gala that funded it lasted one evening. The exhibition runs for eight months.