The met's costume art exhibition reframes fashion as a primary site of visual & social formation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's latest exhibition, Costume Art, boldly repositions fashion on equal footing with painting, sculpture, and other fine arts. Curator Andrew Bolton's vision is to shift the perception of fashion from a secondary, illustrative role to a primary site of visual and social formation.

Connecting art and fashion

To achieve this, Bolton collaborated with designer Anna Rieger, photographers Paul Westlake and Anna-Marie Kellen. Their strategy was to display artworks and dressed mannequins side by side, using gray backgrounds to emphasize the symbiotic connections between the pairings. The cropping and positioning of the images further highlight these links.

The exhibition is organized around different body types, including the naked and nude, pregnant, aging, and others. These themes are introduced in the catalog through innovative paper assemblages created by Julie Wolfe, working in collaboration with photographer Nathalie Agussol. Bolton and Wolfe applied a '1+1=3' approach, blending Art and fashion to yield unique, hybrid entities that are more than the sum of their parts.

Wolfe uses traditional materials like scissors, Exacto knives, and archival adhesives in her practice, often incorporating vintage book pages as a foundation. She deliberately leaves imperfections, cut marks, and irregularities, finding beauty in the human touch. The assemblages serve as a catalyst for viewers to explore their own connections between Art and fashion.

Costume Art is published by Yale University Press and accompanied by a special keepsake box, The Body Electric, featuring a signed and numbered print by Wolfe, along with unbound catalog pages for readers to curate their own pairings.