The Met’s 2026 Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art,” opens May 10 with nearly 400 objects spanning centuries, and its “Fashion Is Art” framing shapes the Met Gala’s dress code for the first time in years — a theme built entirely around historical and archival fashion rather than a single designer or decade.

Key Points

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s own press release confirms “Costume Art” runs May 10, 2026 through January 10, 2027, in the new, nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries at the Met Fifth Avenue.
• Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton says the show “privileges [fashion’s] materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear,” per the Met’s release.
• The exhibition features roughly 400 objects, from 1st- and 2nd-century marble sculpture to contemporary 2023 designs, organized around body types including the Naked, Classical, Pregnant, Aging, Anatomical and Mortal Body.
• The Met Gala’s 2026 dress code, “Fashion Is Art,” invites guests to “express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form,” according to the museum.
• CBS News corroborated the exhibition and gala theme announcement.

For an outlet built on vintage and archival style, this is the rare Met Gala theme that doesn’t require translation. Past themes have leaned on a single designer retrospective or a narrow decade, but “Fashion Is Art” pulls from the Met’s full historical collection — meaning red-carpet interpretations this year have a legitimate excuse to reach for genuinely old silhouettes rather than modern pieces styled to look vintage. The Costume Institute’s own framing, tying nearly 2,000 years of dressed bodies together in one gallery, gives stylists and attendees direct permission to treat centuries-old tailoring, corsetry and drapery as source material rather than just inspiration boards.

The gala itself, held May 4 and co-chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour, functions as the fundraising kickoff for an exhibition the Met has been building toward for years: its first dedicated, permanent home for Costume Institute shows. NPR’s preview coverage noted the scale of the undertaking, framing it as a structural shift in how the museum treats fashion as a permanent, rather than rotating, part of its collection — not just a seasonal exhibition tucked into borrowed gallery space.

That permanence matters for how the theme plays out beyond one red carpet night. Because “Costume Art” runs through January 2027, the body-type curatorial structure — pairing centuries-old sculpture with contemporary garments under headings like the Anatomical Body or the Mortal Body — gives fashion historians and casual museum visitors alike months to actually engage with the ideas the gala only gestures at in a single evening. It’s a rare case where the exhibition itself is built to outlast the internet’s opinions about who wore the theme best.

For anyone who collects, restores or simply loves clothing with real history behind it, “Fashion Is Art” isn’t just a gala dress code — it’s the Met formally arguing that a garment’s construction deserves the same permanent gallery space as a painting or sculpture, which is about as strong an institutional endorsement as vintage fashion has ever gotten.