Jean Cocteau opened his 1918 polemic, Cock and Harlequin, with a zinger of an epigram: “Art is science in the flesh.” That’s probably the kind of intellectual provocation that Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, was aiming for with “Costume Art,” the show that inaugurates the museum’s Condé M. Nast Galleries. Designed by the Brooklyn-based Peterson Rich Office, these are now the first exhibition spaces visitors encounter after entering the Great Hall.* In the show, items of clothing are juxtaposed with works of art from the museum’s seventeen curatorial departments. “The study of dress,” Bolton explains in the catalog, “offers a privileged vantage point from which to reconsider the history of art itself.” He believes that “the history of aesthetics cannot be disentangled from the history of the body that clothes it.” Even if that’s true—I’m not so sure—“Costume Art” isn’t about the body but about the clothes. It’s an infomercial for the fashion industry.
The Condé M. Nast Galleries have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique. The show is sterile—a plod. Even fashions that might originally have had some comic pizzazz (a dress by Batsheva Hay emblazoned with the word “HAG” or Jean Paul Gaultier’s jumpsuits ornamented with drawings of old-fashioned tattoos) are presented as if they demand serious consideration. Many of the mannequins loom high above us, an army of chic automatons. They’ve been specially designed in sizes that acknowledge that the world includes people with different physiques, but where their faces would be, there’s a mirror. Someone must have figured that the mirrored faces would encourage museumgoers to bond with the mannequins—la mode, c’est moi. As for the works of art included, they’re generally small and almost invariably overwhelmed by the clothes. A lot of them are tucked away in vitrines that serve as pedestals for dresses by some of the world’s most exclusive designers. An ancient Greek vase, a Dürer print, a sculpture by Jean Arp, and a Meiji-period hanging basket are given perfunctory presentations. They’re giveaways in an ultra-posh swag bag. The clothes are the heroes of the show.
There is much to be said not only about “Costume Art” but also about the Condé M. Nast Galleries, which are going to be dedicated to Costume Institute exhibitions, while occasionally available for other museum projects. How did rooms focused on fashion become the first galleries visitors now encounter on entering the Met? Why is this space being used in this way? I’m worried about what all of this portends for the future of one of the world’s greatest museums. But before grappling with the questions that are raised by the dedication of these premier spaces to fashion, I think it’s worth considering some of the important artistic issues that the show provokes, although it doesn’t do much to answer them. “Were I an art history professor,” Alex Greenberger wrote in ART news in one of the rare critical assessments of Bolton’s work, “I would have no choice but to give this show a failing grade.” Greenberger ascribes that failure to the often arbitrary juxtapositions of clothes and works of art as well as to the vague or poor labeling of many of the objects, but it goes much deeper. Bolton and his collaborators want to celebrate a synergy between fashion and art, which they view as equal partners in the evolution of style, at least when they’re not coming right out and arguing that fashion precipitates art. What’s missing is anything like a lucid account of style as a cultural phenomenon that shapes and is in turn shaped by the work that creative people do.
The question that looms over “Costume Art” is the question of causality. Where does style come from, whether in art or in fashion? Montesquieu, in his Spirit of the Laws (1748), was among the first to suggest that style and culture more generally are at least in part determined by factors such as geography, climate, and what, for lack of a better term, we think of as spirit of place. In the nineteenth century art historians, among them Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin, argued that particular periods generate particular formal elements, strategies, and qualities, which find expression in the greatest buildings, paintings, and sculptures but also perhaps in clothing and utilitarian objects. An interesting argument can be made—it’s not made in “Costume Art”—that whereas in the Western sculptural tradition originating in Egypt and Greece the essential form is the male body, in an Eastern sculptural tradition originating in India and Southeast Asia the essential form is the female body. If we choose to contemplate such an admittedly broad distinction, we’re immediately forced to consider not only what might have precipitated such divergent directions but also their implications for the development of conventions in the visual arts as well as in dress. Bolton would like us to believe that the way people choose to dress is somehow critical in the formation of a period’s or a group’s artistic understanding. There may be times when that’s true. But who’s to say that broader cultural or social forces aren’t shaping both clothing and painting? Or that styles in the fine arts aren’t affecting styles in dress?
Bolton and his collaborators get away with avoiding these challenging questions in part by acting as if they’re in a hell of a hurry, tossing around objects from across the Met. They would like us to imagine that almost everyone who has considered fashion in the setting of the museum or the classroom has regarded clothes as static objects. There’s an irony here, because that’s exactly how the clothes are displayed in “Costume Art,” while twenty years ago, in the exhibition “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century,” on which Bolton also worked, clothed mannequins were set in dynamic situations in the museum’s period rooms. With “Costume Art,” Bolton sets out to demonstrate how our visceral experience of the clothed human body has shaped the creation and understanding of all sorts of works of art. It’s a daunting project—I think an impossible one—but he evinces neither the patience nor the erudition required to even get it off the ground. “Here,” he writes,
art is reexamined through the analytic lens of dress. Painting, sculpture, visual media, and decorative arts are approached not as autonomous forms but as practices in which clothing structures visibility and mediates subjectivity.
I don’t know what bothers me more about that word salad—the incoherence or the arrogance.
I’m surprised at how many serious attempts to understand the relationship between fashion and art (and fashion and life) Bolton and his collaborators have overlooked entirely or dismissed with a passing reference. While Bernard Rudofsky earns a couple of lines in the bibliography, the curators seem unaware of or indifferent to a show called “Are Clothes Modern?” that he organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944 along with a book of the same name published three years later. Rudofsky was interested in the anthropological dimensions of aesthetics—another show he mounted at MoMA, “Architecture Without Architects” (1964), was about indigenous building styles—and his thoughts about the body and how it’s clothed sometimes parallel concerns in “Costume Art,” such as when he speaks of the “enhancing and increasing of personality through the extension of the body with the help of clothing.” Quentin Bell’s On Human Finery, published a year after Rudofsky’s Are Clothes Modern?, goes unmentioned, despite its interesting discussion of Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about clothing. Anne Hollander’s Seeing Through Clothes (1978) is discussed a few times in passing in the catalog, but her second exploration of the relationship between clothing and culture, Sex and Suits (1994), is ignored, although her discussion of modern male dress touches on questions about the sartorial origins of modern aesthetics that would seem germane to “Costume Art.” (The preponderance of the clothing exhibited here was designed for women.)
“Costume Art” aims for an Olympian swagger, often with inadvertently comic results. Even before museumgoers enter the exhibition, they’re confronted with Bolton’s juxtaposition of Dürer’s print of Adam and Eve, leggings by Vivienne Westwood, and a bodysuit by Andrea Adamo, with shiny metallic fig leaves attached to the relevant parts of the flesh-colored clothing. An accompanying text—the first of dozens, each more ludicrous than the one before—informs visitors that both the artist and the designers are “navigat[ing] the friction between scriptural dogma and the viewer’s gaze.” Does anybody really imagine that that’s what Westwood had in mind? Nearby, Rudi Gernreich’s “Pubikini”—a kind of thong—is juxtaposed with a New Kingdom Egyptian statuette of a nude woman, which, a text informs us, “oscillates between naturalism and stylization.” This highfalutin talk also dominates the exhibition catalog. A single paragraph—the subject is tattoos—includes citations of Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey. This kind of name checking is what passes here for intellectual discernment.
What’s entirely missing in both the exhibition and the catalog is any serious effort to identify the specific ways in which painters, sculptors, and other creative spirits have thought about the human body and the clothes people wear. Bolton may regard such questions as best left to academic grinds, while he polishes his reputation as the philosophe of the fashion industry. But this would have been a much stronger show if even a few of the following themes had been explored: the tradition, dating back to Vitruvius, of associating human bodies with certain fundamental architectural forms; the involvement of Renaissance and Baroque artists with costumes for performances and festivities of all kinds; the use of masks and facial masking both as costumes and as symbols in different times and places; the vogue for working-class dress among avant-gardists, including Picasso and Braque, and its relationship to their quotidian subjects; the collaboration of artists in ballet and modern dance, with Picasso and Derain going so far as to design the makeup for dancers in certain Ballets Russes productions and in at least one instance to actually apply the makeup; and Matisse’s fascination with fabrics and dresses, well documented in the Met’s 2005 show “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams.” Bolton might respond that all of this—and there’s much more—has already been covered. Maybe so. But without these foundational studies, the questions he raises remain unanswerable.
If there was a period in the history of art, fashion, and society in which the kind of interactions that interest Bolton might be demonstrated with relative ease, it’s probably early-eighteenth-century France. A new informality in human relations and style certainly influenced Antoine Watteau’s paintings, from the drawings he made from the model to the improvisational arrangement of those drawings in pictorial compositions and his easygoing way of handling paint. The freedom of Watteau’s art may well reflect new forms of bodily freedom—and sartorial freedom, too. But Watteau isn’t included in “Costume Art,” and in the catalog his name crops up only once, not as an artist but because his paintings influenced a late-nineteenth-century fashion called the “Watteau box pleat.” As it happens, when “Costume Art” opened there was still to be seen, on the second floor of the Met, a brilliant exhibition, “Fanmania,” that included a print after a drawing by Watteau of a woman holding a fan. The focus of “Fanmania,” organized by Ashley E. Dunn and Jane R. Becker, was nineteenth-century France, but the show reached in different directions, including the seventeenth-century printmaker Callot and Japanese prints and lacquer objects. This lucid, elegant show, which as far as I know received no attention in the press, highlighted the fascination of the decorated fan (including examples by Degas and Pissarro) as both portable painting and fashionable accoutrement, something to be regarded in its own right but also understood as part of a woman’s way of presenting herself to the world.
“Costume Art” is divided into a dozen sections, among them “Naked and Nude Body,” “Abstract Body,” “Reclaimed Body,” “Pregnant Body,” “Corpulent Body,” “Disabled Body,” “Anatomical Body,” “Vital Body,” “Aging Body,” and “Mortal Body.” The groupings can be almost absurdly obvious, with red clothing dominating “Anatomical Body” and “Vital Body”—that’s the color of blood—and lots of black and bones in “Mortal Body.” When the categories aren’t obvious, they’re obtuse. The trouble starts with the beginning section, “Naked and Nude Body,” which consists of a row of mannequins that are in fact clothed, decked out in diaphanous dresses or costumes with cutouts, including a dress by Pierre Cardin designed to show off a woman’s bare breasts. The accompanying catalog essay inevitably cites Kenneth Clark’s classic book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956) and his elegant distinction between the naked and the nude. But nobody involved with this show can leave well enough alone, so within a page Clark has somehow given way to Gernreich, who we are told is “isolating and aestheticizing the culturally policed female form.” Once museumgoers have turned away from these not-so-naked naked bodies, they’re confronted with the “Classical Body,” featuring comparisons between dresses with flowing Grecian lines and pieces of ancient pottery with representations of figures in roughly similar outfits. Not only do these juxtapositions tell us nothing about how clothing might generate artistic style—it’s just designers, among them Madeleine Vionnet, Madame Grès, Martin Margiela, and John Galliano, copying classical paintings and sculptures—but it strikes me as amusing that a show that aims to break barriers begins with ancient Greece and Rome, the most old-fashioned starting point anybody could imagine.
“Costume Art” is an intellectual hodgepodge. Picasso’s Blue Period painting of a blind man reaching out his long-fingered hands to eat is set near a couple of dresses in heavily textured fabric, apparently designed to give a sensual experience to the hard of sight. A dress designed for the height-challenged is juxtaposed with an Egyptian statuette of a dancing dwarf. A gown designed by Daniel Roseberry for Schiaparelli, with an elaborate neck decoration in red Swarovski crystals that suggests a heart, is paired with a painting by Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Catherine of Siena Exchanging Her Heart with Christ. What’s the connection? “Di Paolo and Roseberry,” the wall text explains, “externalized vitality, transforming the heart into a mediator between spiritual intensity and corporeal form.” The pairing, in both the show and the catalog, of black-and-white works by de Kooning and a coat by Nadia Pinkney with a splashy black-and-white design derived from brain scans, is said to have something to do with the Alzheimer’s disease that afflicted both de Kooning and some of Pinkney’s relatives. But I’m left wondering if what really interested the curators was the snappy juxtaposition of black-and-white imagery.
Although the show claims to offer ways of thinking about art and fashion through the ages, more than one hundred of the roughly two hundred items included were produced after 2000 and something like a third of them after 2020. This is a show that for all the talk about what people wear—and how it affects the work that painters and sculptors and other artists do—has little or nothing to do with what most people have ever worn. My guess is that some of the work on display is the stuff designers dream up for the runway, scarcely imagining that it will go into production. “Costume Art” is little more than a show of recent fashion masquerading as a scholarly exhibition about the historical relationship between clothing and the arts more generally. But the masquerade cannot be ignored. Behind the fun and games there’s a fashion industry fat with money and prestige and apparently determined to have its way with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fashion has long had a place at the Met. That makes perfect sense, because this is a museum dedicated to representing visual culture in all its variety, with important collections not only of European paintings, Asian pottery, and Islamic textiles but also of ancient coins, musical instruments, and nineteenth-century printed advertising ephemera. The Costume Institute, founded in 1946, is one element in a large, encyclopedic enterprise. And it’s no surprise that it has always been “supported,” as Bolton writes in the catalog, “by the enduring patronage of the American fashion industry.” Patrons often focus on areas with which they have some particular personal or professional affinity. But up until now, when it has come to exhibitions and exhibition spaces, the Costume Institute has been one among many departments at the Met competing for space and attention, which, despite all the museum’s resources, is limited. (This helps to explain why the Met’s important 2023 exhibition honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s death—“Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn”—was presented almost as an afterthought, in the very back of the permanent galleries for late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century art.)
What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met—and bought it for the foreseeable future. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a public trust. Its decision making should be subject to the same kind of scrutiny that investigative reporters regularly bring to all kinds of institutions. Named galleries are nothing new in museums, but naming the galleries devoted to fashion for Condé M. Nast, a publisher instrumental in the development of the fashion industry, is anything but disinterested. According to The New York Times, it was done “in recognition of an undisclosed lead gift from that media empire.” The cost of the galleries, estimated at something like $50 million, was covered by companies and individuals, all or nearly all of whom have ties to fashion.
Considering the justifiable outrage in the media world over Jeff Bezos’s cuts at The Washington Post and his hostility to cultural coverage there, I’m glad that some questions have been raised in the press about his involvement—along with that of his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos—in what we see unfolding at the Met. It’s stated in black-and-white at the entrance to “Costume Art”: “The exhibition is made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.” The Met says that that’s the extent of their involvement with the Condé M. Nast Galleries. Fair enough. But we have every right to ask what their involvement might be in the future. I also wonder if anybody has questioned the wisdom of having several garments included in “Costume Art” by Thom Browne, the designer who donated money toward the construction of the galleries, one of which is named after him. Considering Browne’s importance in the fashion world, his inclusion in the show is understandable. But didn’t anybody worry about the impression of a quid pro quo? When it comes to fashion, does the Met regard this as business as usual?
It isn’t a coincidence that the new fashion galleries are named after the founder of a media empire that in recent years has been dominated by Anna Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of Vogue and currently the global chief content officer at Condé Nast. She’s a trustee of the Met and the force behind the Costume Institute Benefits, better known as the Met Galas, which in recent years have generated an entertainment-world buzz that rivals the Academy Awards; in 2014 the museum’s Costume Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. (I was a contributing editor at Vogue for a decade, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and worked with Wintour.) As The New York Times reported last November when the name of the galleries was announced, “Met curators have long privately complained about how the Costume Institute’s starry red carpet on the museum steps eclipses the other exhibitions and scholarship inside.” Where are the cultural reporters who are willing to dig into these private complaints? What’s been done at the Met probably can’t be undone. But we need to know more about how it happened. There’s too much complacency in the cultural world.
However decisions are being made at the Met, the museum remains nothing less than extraordinary. That’s why this matters. Even as the Condé M. Nast Galleries were opening the museum was host to a couple of formidable shows, not only “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” the blockbuster salute to the Renaissance master that the Met curator Carmen Bambach has been working on for many years, but also “Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship,” a revelatory display of drawings, many of them very large, that served as preparatory studies for some of the greatest monuments of Gothic Europe. It was organized by Femke Speelberg, another Met curator, and the accompanying catalog is a beauty. “Fanmania” was a jewel of a show, as was “Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond,” devoted to the work of a photographer who brought her own kind of kinetic vigor to the fashion world. At the Met there are still curators carrying on the work of their predecessors, among them giants such as Roger Fry, John Pope-Hennessy, William Ivins, and A. Hyatt Mayor. Great museums can sustain a kind of curatorial DNA. We’ve seen it not only at the Met but also at the Museum of Modern Art, where despite many worrisome changes there are still curators who manage to mount shows as scrupulously imagined and executed as “Cézanne Drawing” (2021) and “Picasso in Fontainebleau” (2023–2024).
How can a museum that’s responsible for “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” “Gothic by Design,” and “Fanmania” simultaneously give top billing to something as incoherent and pretentious as “Costume Art”? While the possibility has been left open that exhibitions of other kinds might be mounted in the Condé M. Nast Galleries, it’s understood that, to quote the Times, the museum is “putting fashion first. Literally.” Since everyone, including Max Hollein, the Met’s CEO and director, knows that the new galleries raise serious questions about the museum’s priorities, a sort of defense has been put in place. Rather than seeing here a capitulation to the razzamatazz of the Met Gala and the fundraising chops of the fashion community, Hollein and Wintour would like us to regard the Condé M. Nast Galleries as a way of attracting a supposedly reluctant public to the museum. According to reporting in the Times, Wintour believes that “the high visibility of the gala and the popularity of costume exhibitions make them a gateway for potential visitors who might not otherwise frequent the Met.” Hollein says that “this project presents an opportunity for us to invest even more in the visitor experience.”
These arguments are predicated on a set of assumptions—I believe false assumptions—that have become holy writ in the cultural world, among people involved not only with museums but also with the performing and literary arts. What Hollein and Wintour are suggesting is that the masterworks the Met is most famous for, sculptures and paintings and objects of all kinds from cultures around the world, aren’t enough of an attraction. This line of thinking didn’t begin with Hollein, who became director of the Met in 2018. But there’s now an assumption that it’s enthusiasm for fashion exhibitions, supercharged by the alliance with Vogue and the Met Gala, that’s pulling people in the door. I think Hollein, along with much of the rest of the cultural world, is falling into a trap. The growing attendance at these fashion shows is cited as the reason for foregrounding fashion. And now that fashion is front and center, the attendance figures could go even higher. I visited “Costume Art” on a weekday morning, and the galleries were packed. But these same galleries, if used to accommodate a wide range of temporary shows, might actually expand the audience for more frankly challenging work. “Gothic by Design” would have looked stunning in this space just off the Great Hall. What’s so frustrating is that the people who are running things at the Met underestimate the museumgoing public.
Behind all these questions there’s the more fundamental matter of how museums make sense of art and culture. Bolton is right to believe that all experience is visceral experience, whether we’re putting on a jacket or touching a sculpture or looking at a painting. Our bodies are fundamental to our understanding of our world—and that includes works of art. I think that’s what Cocteau was getting at when he announced that “art is science in the flesh.” We can all agree that an evening gown by Madame Grès or a suit by Chanel is a thing of consequence—a work of art. But behind “Costume Art” and the Condé M. Nast Galleries there lurks a bigger claim—one that must be denied. No piece of clothing can compare with the greatest works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whether a Sumerian statue of Gudea, Duccio’s Madonna and Child, or Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher. They’re still there on Fifth Avenue, but from now on you’re going to have to bypass the fashion show to get to them.
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