The 2026 Met Gala, an evening exhibition celebrating the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be held on May 4. This year’s theme, Costume Art, addresses “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” per curator Andrew Bolton.

Fashion Is Art

The event will pair sculptures, paintings, and other objects across 5,000 years of art represented in The Met, alongside historical and contemporary garments from the Costume Institute. Organized around thematic body types commonly captured in art, as well as body types rarely represented, like pregnant bodies, aging bodies, and the anatomical body.

“What connects every curatorial department and what connects every single gallery in the museum is fashion, or the dressed body,” Bolton stated. “It’s the common thread throughout the whole museum, which is really what the initial idea for the exhibition was, this epiphany: I know that we’ve often been seen as the stepchild, but, in fact, the dressed body is front and centre in every gallery you come across.”

The exhibition will also mark the inauguration of the nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M Nast Galleries, adjacent to The Met’s Great Hall.

The dress code for the exhibition, Fashion is Art, is vague but fitting for the theme, as there’s room for interpretation. Costume Art will run from May 10, 2026, to January 10, 2027, following the Met Gala, which provides the Costume Institute with its primary source of funding for all activities.

“I wanted to present fashion as a lens with which to look at art,” explained Bolton. “I wanted the pairings to be sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual, sometimes political, sometimes humorous, sometimes deeply profound and sometimes light-hearted. 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 walls of the museum.”