Here’s a pop quiz: What do all 17 curatorial departments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art have in common?
It isn’t oil paint or excellent air-conditioning. “What connects them all is the dressed body,” said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion department.
Roam through the museum and you will see what he means. There are lacy bibs rendered one brushstroke at a time by the Dutch masters; iron breastplates hammered into shape by 18th-century Japanese armorers; a gossamer tutu wrapped around a bronze ballerina sculpted by Edgar Degas. Everywhere you turn, you’ll find bodies — bodies wearing clothes.
That recognition may be blisteringly obvious or revelatory, depending on your relationship to fashion. But it forms the foundation of “Costume Art,” the spring fashion exhibition opening May 10 after a starry kickoff at the Met Gala. The exhibition pairs almost 200 sculptures, drawings and other artworks with approximately 200 garments and accessories from the Costume Institute.
They are grouped into 13 “thematic body types,” some of which have names abstract enough to stump an art history major: the vital body, the reclaimed body and the inscribed body, among others. Bolton said the categories were drawn up to interrogate how fashion interacts with the breadth of human forms, including those that are tattooed or plus-size, pregnant or creased with age. Several sections made a point of “focusing on bodies that have not been socially valorized within Western culture,” he added.
The first stretch of the exhibition asks viewers to meditate on the things that make bodies different, while the second considers the features that all bodies share (like skeletons and veins, both of which are plentiful in a section devoted to the anatomical body).
“Because of the closeness of the body, fashion hasn’t been seen as a serious study of aesthetics,” Bolton said. The exhibition argues that fashion is just as valuable a discipline as painting or sculpture precisely because of its relationship to the human form.
I met Bolton in the museum’s basement the day before the pieces began being installed in the new Condé M. Nast Galleries upstairs. He offered a closer look at seven garments in the exhibition and the artworks that he had chosen to pair with them.
