I went to see Costume Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last month expecting a profound exploration of how fashion designers have historically responded to, absorbed, and reinterpreted fine art traditions. I wanted to see how the radical ideas and aesthetics of art movements shaped the silhouette and soul of dress, far beyond mere tailoring. Instead, I walked into a secular sermon. Well, one delivered in a visual feast of a setting, truth be told.
Like so many current "high" art exhibits, it filtered everything through a "critical" lens on the body as a socially constructed idea. My excitement at learning how designers were inspired by or reacting to art pieces and traditions quickly curdled into frustration as label after label steered me away from artistry, history, context, and the age-old connection between objects and style — and toward, well, navel-gazing (no need to pardon the pun).
I was (re)told about how we as more enlightened beings of 2026 need to keep hyper-fixating on our own neuroses and prejudices against different body shapes and abilities, and scold ourselves to do better.
It's not that these aren't relevant topics — it's that I can find this everywhere, from Target ads to every influencer's Instagram account. I was longing for something fresh and deep I can't get elsewhere. Something that connects dots I couldn't see for myself.
Perhaps someone needs to tell Anna Wintour that checking every identity box at once — gender, fashion, body image, disability — is no longer a subversive move. It's the ambient water of the 2020s we all swim in. Self-reflection on bodies and biases has a place, but here it drowns out access to the wider historical and cultural picture of... well, everything else.
What resulted was a forced taxonomy: theory, art objects from different times and cultures, and outfits heavily favoring the last decade (about half the show's roughly 200 ensembles were made within the last ten years!), stitched together by wall text that read like it was written by and for grad students in a Columbia semiotics seminar.
My diagnosis: curatorial overreach. That's when the jargon does more work than the objects themselves — a perennial issue with exhibitions that try too hard to be "relevant."
This constant signaling of how vitally important the show is reveals a profound institutional insecurity. I walked away asking — is The Met terrified that fashion will be dismissed as superficial or commercial without it? Are those over-written wall labels meant to function as a sort of "armor" to give the clothes artificial gravitas?
Ok, enough of what I didn't care for. Let me show you the installations that took my breath away. Given my taste, they centered on the classical world as well as anatomical illustration.
Behold some of the masterpieces...
Finally, here is the most visually striking display in the show: a diorama of Issey Miyake's white knit outfits from his 1999 A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) line. Cloth as epidermis!
And then...
Quietly tucked away on the other side of the museum I stumbled upon a very different fashion exhibition:
Lillian Bassman: Bazaar and Beyond
I had never heard of Lillian Bassman (1917–2012), which is surprising considering she mentored Richard Avedon. In 1941, at age 24, she was hired by a Harper's Bazaar that was ready to flirt with abstracting fashion photography. Eventually becoming the magazine's art director, she pushed the medium beyond its normal limits for asymmetry and distortion, presenting a haunting aesthetic lush with movement, sensuality, and freshness.
She destroyed much of her own work, believing it was out of fashion — then decades later rediscovered her negatives and reprinted them, sparking a major late-career revival.
This exhibit marks a large gift to the Museum from her children. The Met devoted two small rooms to her oeuvre and it was a jewel box of delight. If you find yourself in NYC this month, it's on display until July 26th.
P.S Her parents fled the pogroms of Ukraine in the early 20th century and met as intellectual bohemians in the Met galleries!
P.P.S. The Smithsonian has a five-minute oral history interview of her discussing her life, recorded just before she died.
Have thoughts? I’d love to hear them — drop a comment below.