The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts the Met Gala May 4 to celebrate the new “Costume Art” exhibition. Carlos Delgado via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0 Walking into the sea of mannequins that fill the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new “Costume Art” exhibition, you will see some tall, thin, willowy bodies typical of storefronts. But you’ll also see larger bodies, pregnant bodies, trans bodies and bodies with disabilities—all with mirrors for faces to reflect the experience back to the visitor.
These diverse mannequin forms, a first for the museum, are meant to highlight the artistry and aesthetics of fashion on every body.
“The whole show [is] structured around a typology of bodies, and these are bodies that you see across the museum when you encounter artworks,” Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, tells Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson. “The simple thesis for the show really is the fact that the dressed body is the connecting thread throughout the entire museum.”
Across the exhibition are roughly 400 artworks organized in pairs: Every painting, sculpture or statue is paired with a garment. For example, Georges Seurat’s 1884 study for A Sunday on La Grande Jatte hangs next to a walking dress from the 1880s.
“Whenever you go to exhibitions where art and fashion are in juxtaposition of each other, you’re always encouraged to see fashion through the lens of art, which becomes a much more disembodied experience,” Bolton adds to Vogue. “And what I wanted to do was simple, but I think radical, was to sort of shift that on its head so that you actually look at the artwork through the lens of fashion.”
To create the new mannequins, the Met used real-life models, including artist Michaela Stark, who’s known for binding her own flesh; model Antwan Tolliver, who became paraplegic as a result of gun violence; and activist Sinéad Burke, who was born with a form of dwarfism.
Each model had to pose in front of 175 cameras simultaneously in little to no clothing. The mannequins were then designed online, 3D-printed and hand-finished.
Aariana Rose Philip, a Black trans model who posed for a mannequin, tells the New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman that the efforts of this exhibition were meaningful to her.
“My life’s work in the fashion industry has been wanting disability to be more recognized and more accepted, rather than hidden away,” Philip says. “So to have an opportunity to be a part of art history, to be able to go to my favorite museum and see myself, was a deeply surreal feeling. I cried so many happy tears.”
Nine models served as the basis for 18 mannequins, and another seven structures weren’t based on real people but do aim to reflect underrepresented experiences in fashion, like the pregnant body. Other mannequins throughout the exhibition show body types more commonly featured in fashion and art, and Bolton tells Jocelyn Noveck for the Associated Press that the exhibition is not trying to “reject what came before.”
“We’re using it as an opportunity to add new voices and new silhouettes and new presences,” he says. “The figures don’t deny the past, but in a way, I suppose they complete the picture.”
“Costume Art” is the first exhibition in the new galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At nearly 12,000 square feet, the space is named for Condé M. Nast.
After “Costume Art” finishes its run in January 2027, the mannequins will be added to the museum’s permanent collection for future uses. In this cultural moment, Stark tells the Times, this exhibition’s message matters.
“It institutionalizes the idea that bodies are different,” she says.
“Costume Art” is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from May 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027.
Mary Randolph is a former editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.
