![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/12.-CorpulentBody--1230x820.jpg\")
The erratic management of art history in the Met’s latest exhibition is harmless compared to its quasi-taxonomic classification of humans
\n\n\n\nThe latest edition of the Costume Institute’s annual spring exhibition is an exercise in pattern recognition and analogy – and a real head-scratcher at that. The nearly 400-object show, whose stated aim is to ‘assert the central role of the dressed body in art throughout history’, presents its works in dyads. Each garment or ensemble, ranging from armour to lingerie to eveningwear, is paired with an artwork – most likely a Western figurative painting, print or sculpture – from the museum’s permanent collection. (The mannequins prove important as well; more on them later.) The associative, ahistoric pairings seem to have been determined based on any number of parallels – in form, process or material, or in the designers’ and artists’ biographies and backgrounds. At the Met, this logic has yielded a cross between Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas (c. 1924–29) and a modern-day machine-learning image cluster. If one prefers traditional art history, with timelines, maps and object-specific context, there are other wings of the museum for that.
\n\n\n\nThe connections between the objects in the galleries are pareidolic to be sure. A mannequin wearing Rudi Gernreich’s Pubikini (1985) – a pair of black bikini underwear – evidently recalls an Egyptian limestone statuette of a nude woman with black painted pubic hair (1550–1295 BCE), displayed slightly below eye level, in a vitrine directly beneath its corresponding mannequin’s feet (most of the works here are installed this way, with the mannequin towering over visitors, the art demoted to the position of a footnote). Ying Gao’s Incertitudes, garment 1’ ensemble (2013), which consists partly of a short white dress covered in steel pins that stand upright like porcupine quills and move in response to environmental noises, is displayed above a 1980s drawing by David Hockney composed of line segments of varying lengths, thicknesses and opacities, one of the few abstract artworks in the show. The visual resemblance – between the sound-responsive frock by a Montreal-based designer known for integrating AI into her garments and the markings made by a British Pop artist who, the wall label notes, was impacted by hearing loss beginning in his thirties – is clear enough that one could leave with the mistaken impression that Gao drew direct inspiration from Hockney.
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At times, the visual similarities are strikingly obvious. A rare three-way juxtaposition sees Van Gogh’s Irises (1890) hung between Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Irises’ ensemble from spring/summer 1988 and a Loewe ensemble from spring/summer 2025 with the same Postimpressionist floral arrangement printed on a feathered silk-cotton top. The object label attempts to nuance the connection by citing the Dutch painter’s mental health struggles, Saint Laurent’s depression and Jonathan Anderson’s – formerly of Loewe – dyslexia as the reasons why these mannequins are standing guard on either side of their outfits’ source material. At times, visual similitude takes a backseat to context. Seiran Tsuno’s Out of Body, In Dress (2026), a pale, 3D-pen fabricated second skin hanging from a mannequin’s neck, recalls the curvaceous physiques of Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Nana sculptures, but the corresponding work here is, surprisingly, an 1895 lithograph of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). The wall label notes that Tsuno, in addition to being a designer, works as a psychiatric nurse and that Munch’s heavy linework suggests ‘suffocating existential anguish’. Especially given that Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are lead sponsors of the exhibition, it is difficult not to hear the needling refrain of Amazon’s recommendations list in the galleries: ‘Customers also bought…’
\n\n\n\nIn lieu of chronology, the exhibition is organised by theme. Galleries are devoted, for instance, to the ‘Naked Body’, the ‘Classical Body’, the ‘Pregnant Body’, the ‘Disabled Body’, the ‘Corpulent Body’, the ‘Aging Body’, the (racialised) ‘Epidermal Body’, the (tattooed) ‘Inscribed Body’ and so on. Several mannequins were cast using real people, including trans model Alex Consani, disability activist Sinéad Burke – who has dwarfism – and model-musician Aariana Rose Philip – who has quadriplegia cerebral palsy. Representations of their bodies, installed above eye level, appear heroic and dignified, though some of their corresponding artworks muddy the message. One confounding juxtaposition sees a Rick Owens silk ensemble from spring/summer 1998 (edition 2025) worn on a mannequin modelled after the disabled drag artist Sandie Crisp – better known as the Goddess Bunny – paired with Andrew Wyeth’s 1947 pencil-on-paper study of his neighbour Christina Olson, who would become the subject of one of the most recognised images in twentieth-century American art, Christina’s World (1948). Like Crisp, Olson lived with a neurological condition that affected her mobility. But because Wyeth, in his depictions of Olson, famously modelled parts of her anatomy on that of his able-bodied wife, his work’s inclusion raises questions about whether the agency of disabled people can be fully represented by artists and designers looking on from the outside. Nearby, one finds Hussein Chalayan’s ‘Surgical’ corset from spring/summer 1996 above a 1939 photograph of Frida Kahlo, who suffered spinal injuries from a bus accident when she was eighteen. In the photo, the orthopaedic corset Kahlo wore throughout her life following the accident, mentioned in the wall label, is not visible; the artist stands in a red shawl with her arms crossed, leaning against a wall. Chalayan’s ‘surgical’ corset looms over the portrait, an embodiment of aesthetic form devoid of function.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/25.-EpidermalBody-1230x811.jpg\")
Costume Art’s erratic management of art history – as set dressing for a protagonist known as the ‘dressed body’ – is harmless compared to its quasi-taxonomic classification of bodies, which unfolds with a drifty mien of department-store neutrality. The hierarchy is evident in the sequencing: after traversing an anteroom devoted to slender, normative ‘naked’ bodies, viewers entering the exhibition are greeted by the ‘Classical Body’ – gowns, breastplates, effigies and vessels referencing Ancient Greece, a culture known for its veneration of symmetry, proportionality, youth and athleticism – after which every other category follows, as deviations from the implied ideal. Eschewing intersectionality, the exhibition dissects the body and compartmentalises its characteristics, as if being pregnant were a state of existence separable from one’s experience of age and physical ability, as if one can contemplate a person’s tattoos without also seeing the colour of their skin. The show saves race for its final gallery, the ‘Epidermal Body’, which features Louboutin pumps from autumn/winter 2022–23 in shades ranging from dark brown to white, designed to ‘respond to more ethnically diverse consumers’, and Telfar bags in similar nude tones. Such a finale, with its emphasis on diversity, makes one wonder why all the mannequins in the show are the same dull greige as the gallery walls. If nothing else, Costume Art proves that one can upend traditional perceptions of cultural products simply by dislodging them from their temporal and geographic contexts, but the same cannot be said for us humans and our bodies.
\n\n\n\nCostume Art is at The Met Fifth Avenue, New York, through 10 January 2027.
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