What You Need to Know About the 2026 Met Gala Theme “Costume Art”
What You Need to Know About the 2026 Met Gala Theme “Costume Art”
By Brooklyn Hoffmann — December 1, 2025
Every spring on the first Monday of May, designers and celebrities ascend New York City’s most iconic staircase for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Exhibition. Known as The Met Gala, this major fundraising event doubles as the world’s most influential fashion spectacle through elaborate themed costumes, establishing cultural conversations, and generating immense media attention—all while serving as the institute’s primary source of funding for exhibitions, acquisitions, publications, and operations.
Under Trustee Anna Wintour, who has been co-chair since 1995, the annual Met Gala has become one of the most visible and successful charity events, with attendees from the worlds of fashion, film, society, sports, business, and music.
The recently announced theme for Spring 2026 returns to what the gala has long embodied at its core: Fashion is art.
The 2026 Met Gala and the accompanying exhibition will follow the theme of “Costume Art,” which addresses “...the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” said Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton.
Bolton became curator in charge in 2016. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018) remains The Met’s most visited exhibition, drawing more than 1.65 million visitors across The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Other record-breaking exhibitions curated by Bolton include: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, China: Through the Looking Glass, Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, and Camp: Notes on Fashion.
The 2026 exhibition will juxtapose artworks—sculptures, paintings, and objects spanning five centuries—with historical and contemporary garments. One example pairs a terracotta statuette from the late 5th century BCE with a 1920s Fortuny gown, highlighting parallels in color, draping, and fabrication.
The exhibition also marks the opening of the nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall. Bolton told Vogue, “It’s a huge moment for the Costume Institute. It will be transformative for our department, but I also think it’s going to be transformative to fashion more generally—the fact that an art museum like The Met is actually giving a central location to fashion.”
Traditionally, the Costume Institute has emphasized clothing’s visual appeal, with the mannequins disappearing behind or underneath garments. Bolton’s driving idea for “Costume Art” is to insist on the significance of the body, or “the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear.”
The exhibition will also focus on Western art and will feature nearly 200 artworks displayed alongside 200 garments and accessories. It will be divided into three sections: bodies omnipresent in art (the classical body and the nude form), bodies less frequently acknowledged (pregnant or aging bodies), and universal bodies (the anatomical body). Designed by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of Peterson Rich Office, the exhibition will position mannequins on six-foot pedestals with corresponding artworks embedded directly into the structures.
“Costume Art” is notably the first of Bolton’s exhibitions without a subtitle—an intentional gesture underscoring its conceptual clarity. Fashion is, simply and powerfully, art. “Costume Art” will run from May 10, 2026, to Jan. 10, 2027, following the Met Gala on May 4, 2026. Its guiding idea is straightforward: In every gallery, fashion and the human form are inseparable.
For more fashion, beauty, and lifestyle content, keep reading Square Magazine. Follow Square on Instagram and TikTok for exclusive content.
All images belong to their respective owners.