New Met Gala fashion exhibit seeks to ‘reclaim’ body types that art history has ignored

But the idea of “Costume Art,” which examines the dressed body through centuries of art history, is not to celebrate the classical form. It is rather, says Andrew Bolton, longtime curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, to use that form as a launch pad.

“Now, we go through and reclaim the body,” he says, leading a reporter through the gleaming new Conde M. Nast galleries that the show will inaugurate.

The corpulent body. The disabled body. The pregnant body. The aging body. The new show, which gala guests will view before it opens to the public May 10, is the most consciously body-positive show the museum has attempted. Perhaps its most prominent feature is a group of new mannequins, based on real people with a wide variety of body types.

There is even, in the “aging body” section, an enormous gray hoodie, emblazoned with the phrase: “I’M RETIRED. (This is as dressed up as I get.)” Just in case you’re tired of the whole glittery glamour thing.

Bolton took The Associated Press through the exhibit late last week as a huge team of installers was busy hammering, nailing, posing and otherwise adjusting the 400 items on display. Here are some of the highlights.

A new space, giving fashion its due

Last year, the Met Gala, a fundraiser for the Costume Institute, brought in a record $31 million. That gargantuan sum alone — it grows every year — can explain why the museum has granted its only self-funding department some prominent new digs, fashioned from former retail space on the museum’s main floor, right off the Great Hall. “We're in the epicenter of the museum,” notes Bolton, with evident pride. It will house all future fashion exhibits, making them easier to reach for guests and enabling shows to last longer; “Costume Art” will be up for 8 months.

The universality of … diversity

The show travels through centuries of art history by pairing art objects with fashion garments, making the argument that not only is fashion art — that's indeed the gala dress code — but more profoundly, art is fashion. Its first main gallery bears the title “Bodily Being in its Diversity,” and begins with flowing Grecian-style gowns, paired with images on Greek vases or flasks. But the display soon veers from classic forms into those that fashion has traditionally ignored.

The pregnant body, unhidden

Bolton argues that the pregnant body has either been ignored or stereotyped in art. Here, he presents designers — often female, working in the late 20th century or later — who have explored and accentuated the expectant form. The so-called “pregnancy dress” from British designer Georgina Godley, which appeared in her 1986 “Bump and Lump” collection, is a straightforward celebration of the extended pregnant belly. It is paired with a rare (for the time) 1920 sculpture by French artist Edgar Degas, “Pregnant Woman” — a nude figure holding her belly and seeming to reflect on what's to come.

The corpulent body, unfettered

Garments on display here include the corsetry of designer Michaela Stark, who posed herself for three of the new mannequins. One of them displays the corsetry ensemble “Fat Not Fertile” — fighting the trope that a larger body represents reproduction and fertility. Stark uses corsets to bind the flesh and accentuate, not hide it — to “bring back power to the female form.” The ensemble is paired with an ancient marble statuette resembling the same body type.

The disabled body takes center stage

A striking subset of the Reclaimed Body section explores the disabled body, itself divided into different types of disability: physical, sensory and cognitive.

In one ensemble, a mannequin based on Paralympian athlete, model and actor Aimee Mullins wears a pair of Victorian-esque Alexander McQueen boots, which are really prosthetic limbs. The outfit is paired with a 1965 sculpture, “The Amputee,” by John Gutmann.

Irish disability activist Sinéad Burke, who was born with dwarfism, also posed for two mannequins. One wears a Burberry trench coat, cut down for length — and including part of a discarded sleeve, refashioned into a headpiece. The other is a Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren “Mickey and Minnie” dress, paired with an ancient Egyptian statue of a dancing dwarf.

Model and activist Aariana Rose Philip, who uses a wheelchair, also posed for a mannequin, placed in its own chair — wearing a pair of denim shorts and a shirt bearing the slogan: “Queer Capital.” The display is accompanied by a work from artist Lucy Jones, who, like Philip, lives with cerebral palsy.

Exploring a less visible disability is a coat by Scottish designer Nadia Pinkney, who paid homage in her “Remember Me Knot” collection to both her grandmother and great-grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s. The coat’s pattern — derived, according to curators, from brain scans — is meant to reflect the “physiological tangles” the disease inflicts on the brain’s structure.

It's paired with a lithograph by Willem de Kooning, whose own experience with Alzheimer’s affected his late-career work.

The vital body — colorful and bloody

The second main gallery is devoted not to diversity so much as commonality — those things that unite us all. Like aging, which the show seeks to reframe as “a mode of sophistication rather than biological decline.” And mortality. There’s also a whole bloody section on, well, blood.

This includes Westwood’s “Martyr to Love” evening jacket where shiny beads represent a muscled torso, and deep red beading portrays blood dripping from a wound. It is paired with German painter Albrecht Dürer’s “Man of Sorrows with Arms Outstretched.”

“Costume Art” opens to the public May 10 and runs through Jan. 10, 2027.