At New York's Met Museum, Costume Art Runs Through January 10, 2027

The Costume Institute's exhibition "Costume Art" is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Fifth Avenue building on the Upper East Side. The Costume Institute's official Instagram account lists the closing date as January 10, 2027.

The show builds on the idea that fashion transforms the body, and that the clothed body is central to artistic expression and representation. The Costume Institute frames that idea through four lenses: age, size, gender and disability. In the museum's own framing, the exhibition looks at how fashion's canon gets assembled and what it includes.

A book of the same name accompanies the show, published by The Costume Institute and MetPubs. It carries new photography by Paul Westlake and is produced with some care: a die-cut cover, three specialty papers, debossed details and metallic silver foils. Julie Wolfe made assemblages for the volume, photographed by Nathalie Agussol. These were commissioned specifically for the book and use collage, overlay and juxtaposition to link art and fashion. The book is sold at The Met Store.

The Costume Institute's recent Instagram posts also give a sense of the collection behind the show. They highlight Isabel Toledo's "Kangaroo" dress from fall/winter 1993, a jersey piece manipulated to pool into a pouch-like pocket over the stomach. The post pairs it with the sketch of the dress by Ruben Toledo, Isabel's partner and collaborator, which documents how the garment is constructed. Another post shows fashion show invitations from The Costume Institute Library, including ones for Dior spring/summer 2026, AREA New York spring/summer 2023 and Off-White fall/winter 2025.

The Met Fifth Avenue is at 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028. For readers coming from Japan, the Costume Institute is the department that treats garments as museum objects in their own right, and this exhibition places that collection at the center of a broader conversation about art.