Is fashion art, or is art fashion? 🤷🏽♂️
The debate has gone on for years, but we might be getting closer to an answer this May when the
@metcostumeinstitute at the
@metmuseum moves out of the basement and into one of the museum’s most prominent spaces, right by the Great Hall.
For curator Andrew Bolton, the distinction hardly matters. Fashion, he argues, sits in a category of its own. It is worn, lived in, and shaped by real life in a way no other art form quite is.
“Fashion is more art than art is,” according to Andy Warhol, and here are some slides which help support this argument…
1 & 2) Michaela Stark’s body-binding corsetry, here seen on model Jill Kortleve, find common ground on the exuberant colors, full figure, and winding snake in Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Nana and Serpent from 1992. Niki De Saint-Phalle © 2026 Niki Charitable Art Foundation/ARS, NY/ADAGP, Paris.
3 & 4) The contours of Angelina Kendall’s surging Duran Lantink dress find an echo in Jean Arp’s undulating Configuration in Serpentine Movements I (1950) (from the MET’s holdings).
5 & 6) Model Adut Akech Bior, pregnant with her second child, in Loewe, finds an echo in a gourd-shaped artefact - part of The Met’s collection of Japanese 19th-century Meiji period art.
7 & 8) Model Libby Taverner’s black wool-mohair Olivier Theyskens gown with its arterial network bleeds into a close-up of Chiharu Shiota’s 2024 work ‘In Circles’.
Chiharu Shiota © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
9 & 10) A 2024 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello hosiery dress, worn by model Mona Tougaard, finds an echo in an ancient Egyptian relief from the collection of The Met, Dancers with Instruments (circa 1353–1336 BCE).
11 & 12) Designers Robert Wun Couture and Thom Browne Couture have styled models Yasmin Warsame and Betsy Gaghan in an echo to the 1746 work by French anatomist and artist Jacques Fabien Gautier Dagoty who painted a flayed female subject in Myologie Complette en Couleur et Grandeur Naturelle (Courtesy of Jacques Fabien Gautier Dagoty).
