“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 collectsing 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.”
But they were a long time coming, and all the while the audience for fashion has grown dramatically. “The relationship between fashion and art has become less defensive,” says the artist Maurizio Cattelan, one of several artists and curators I spoke to about The Met’s new galleries in the course of writing this story. “Fashion no longer asks for permission from art, and art no longer pretends to ignore fashion. They’ve understood they share the same obsession: the body, power, desire, status.” He goes on, “At The Met, fashion has moved from being displayed as craft to being framed as narrative. The exhibitions feel less like wardrobes and more like arguments. That shift, from object to idea, is where fashion becomes interesting.”
“The impact of the Costume Institute and its exhibitions has grown enormously over the last 30 years,” says the designer Michael Kors, who reels off name after name (from Mark Rothko to John Singer Sargent to Georgia O’Keeffe) when I ask him how art and artists have influenced his work. “It’s opened people’s eyes to the interconnection between fashion and everything—from pop culture to politics to art. It has shown the public that fashion is about more than just the clothes you put on every day.”
And these new galleries, says the designer Tory Burch, “will recognize fashion as an essential part of our shared history. The Met has always understood that fashion is a vital form of creative expression, one that shapes and reflects our culture.”
Even so, the Costume Institute’s spring show remained stateless for years. The new home came about after a long campaign (much of it led by the global editorial director at this magazine) and resulted in a daunting assignment for an architecture firm. The commission went to the Brooklyn-based firm Peterson Rich Office, whose principals, Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson—a husband-and-wife team who had their first date at The Met—immersed themselves in the history of the museum and its 21 separate buildings. “It’s more of a city than a building,” says Peterson. The two studied the Great Hall and thought about how it might lead to the galleries and considered the way light filters in. They knew their job would be to create a new urban pathway and they worked closely with Bolton. “It was wonderful having conversations with him,” says Peterson. “We felt a deep resonance between architecture as a field and costume as an art form.” Bolton needed a flexible space, where lighting could be adjusted and power provided, but he wanted it to reflect something of the stature of the Greek and Roman galleries. “It had to be a rotating exhibition space,” says Rich. “It needed to constantly change. At the same time, it had to feel as if it had always been there.” The new almost-12,000-square-foot galleries are divided into five interconnected spaces, and they incorporate limestone thresholds, echoing the limestone arches in the Great Hall. The luminescent gray-and-white stone floors, beamed ceilings, and Venetian plaster walls flood the new space with an aura of permanence.
“Fashion at The Met has grown from celebrating beauty and craftsmanship to exploring culture, politics, and history,” says Dasha Zhukova, an art collectsor, businesswoman, and trustee at the museum. “It’s not just about what we wear, but what clothing tells us about who we are. So I wouldn’t call it controversial that the Costume Institute has taken center stage at The Met. The new galleries are about perspective, not hierarchy.”
Zhukova also points out that the Costume Institute has been responsible for engaging a younger and more diverse audience. This audience is especially uninterested in drawing boundaries. The painter Anna Weyant, herself just 31, tells me firmly that costume should be regarded as art and indeed as one of art’s most “political forms.”
Tschabalala Self (whose brilliant work Evening can be seen on page 146) says, “To me, the separation between fashion and art is a false dichotomy. They’re both means of expression, and they’re both vehicles—modalities, really—that allow artists to express the concerns and desires of our time…. I’m really excited to see the new exhibition…. I’m a figurative painter, so the body is central in my practice. It’s something we all share, and when we dress we all make a statement.”
“The term art is a legacy of a much older term from the ancient Greeks: arete, which translates as ‘excellence,’ ” says the artist Paul Chan. “So it seems to me that there can be excellence in costumes as much as in any painting or sculpture.”
Any dissent to The Met’s grand move? “I regard fashion as an art but not as Art,” comments Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum in Lower Manhattan. And yet Gioni is quick to point out that museums and curators (“myself included,” he says) have expanded their field of vision. “It doesn’t even matter whether fashion is art or not: certainly it is a discipline, a practice that can tell us a lot about what we desire and value—as such, it is a language worth listening to and engaging with if we want to learn more about ourselves.”
“The difference between art and fashion is time,” says the artist Rachel Feinstein. “Fashion is about the present, about now. Next year, what you’re presently seeing on the runway is going to look dated, where a painting or sculpture made today will not. Art has a longevity aspect—it’s meant to last.”
Boundaries vanish in the new exhibition Bolton has mounted. In conception, “Costume Art” is inclusive and collaborative, and the unifying theme is the human body and how it has been depicted—dressed, undressed, decorated, honored, injured, and mourned. In a series of revelatory, often surprising, sometimes purposefully jarring, juxtapositions, the exhibition pairs objects and images with clothing: a 460 BCE Greek vessel with a 1920s gown by Fortuny; Albrecht Dürer’s Man of Sorrows with Arms Outstretched with Vivienne Westwood’s Martyr to Love jacket; an 1883 walking dress that appears to have strolled out of Seurat’s study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte; Jean Arp’s and Henry Moore’s curvilinear sculptures with ensembles by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons. The exhibition reveals the long and symbiotic relationship between art and fashion—making the case that they are separate but equal art forms.
“I wanted to present fashion as a lens with which to look at art,” Bolton explains. “I wanted the pairings to be sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual, sometimes political, sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply profound, and sometimes lighthearted. When you juxtapose a garment with an artwork, another meaning comes about. Something else happens. I want to focus on that. It’s as if one plus one equals three…. Hopefully, the show will empower people to make those connections beyond the four walls of the museum.”
“I’ve been struck by how The Met’s presentation of fashion has shifted from something archival to something more immersive, almost cinematic,” says the artist Laurie Simmons. “The exhibitions have taken on narrative, mood, psychology—more of a sense of performance…. The museum is acknowledging that the body—dressed, styled, staged—is as rich and loaded as any ancient relic. It’s also an ongoing story that’s constantly being rewritten in real time. Its placement near the Egyptians and across from the Greeks and Romans feels less like a disruption and more like a correction. It acknowledges that what we wear is also civilization’s artifact.”
“I like the idea that some of the glamour of fashion is rubbings off on painting and artists,” the artist John Currin tells me. “I care about painting even more than sculpture or architecture or photography; still, I think these things coexist wonderfully, especially fashion, because it’s been so beneficial for the museum.” Institutions like The Met need change, he argues; nothing should be regarded as sacred. “They should have a celebrity zoo at The Met,” he says. “People naked in cages. They can work out in front of everybody…. I’ll give up the bookstore if that’s what it takes. (The Met has not given up its store—only relocated it.)
Finally, I asked my husband, Calvin Tomkins, who wrote the history of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Merchants and Masterpieces) the question I’d been asking everyone. “Can costume be art and art be fashion?” He answered with a resounding “Yes!” and added, “In fact, the two are so close that they can’t help being
each other.”
In this story: hair, Jimmy Paul; makeup, Kabuki; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Carol Ai.
Produced by Special Production Agency. Set Design: Studio Wagner.
All artwork images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.