A cursory first glance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Costume Art” (on view May 10, 2026–January 10, 2027) warned of potential disappointment ahead. After the triumph of Black recognition last year that was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” how could this inaugural show in the museum’s new, nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Gallery live up to what was so wonderful?
Purporting to examine the centrality of the dressed body, with complementary and contrasting juxtapositions of clothing and works of art, the exhibition aims to make connections between both; examine synthesis; and expose contradictions between art, attire, and adornment.
The physical environment was reassuring. It was clearly arranged and carefully constructed, even incorporating newly uncovered vestigial elements of earlier incarnations of the museum’s nineteen19th-century galleries. So was the diversity of the design team, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the press preview. It includes Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO). “Must all entities be ‘diverse’ to be satisfactory,” I’m sometimes asked. Not necessarily, but in as heterogeneous a place as New York, there are few legitimate reasons for them not to be.
However, there at the very beginning of the exhibits, was a version of something I deplore. In the most imposing double-height space in the series of rooms was a broad survey of an aspect of what I’ve called “the Tyranny of Whiteness.” Attic vases (style of ancient Greek pottery, with black-painted backgrounds featuring figures and details left in the clay’s natural red or orange color), Classical statuary from Greece, and Rome and neo-Classical nudes from Victorian America are presented with dresses showing meticulous gatherers meant to imitate the draperies of the latter. They are all in variants of white, off-white, and beige. They perpetuate the fallacy that ancient sculptures and architecture were devoid of color, and were purer and more refined for its absence. To help popularize this notion of esthetic white supremacy, archeologists, art dealers, and architects, from the Renaissance onward, scoured, scraped, and bathed once highly polychromed artifacts in acid to achieve the desired inviolate appearance when digging up objects with traces of original color that contradicted this outlook.
Looking on, “Where,” I thought, “is the Hottentot Venus and her descendants? What of Josephine Baker and her girdle of bananas that drove 50 million Frenchmen wild, just as Grace Jones and Toukie Smith did, if perhaps to a lesser extent? Misty Copeland and the Williams sisters (all Met Gala chairs) have said that due to the particularity of their Black bodies, they were deemed not to be suitable candidates to dance ballet or to play tennis. Discouraged in their careers, where is the specificity of their Black bodies?”
Fortunately, just as I felt ready to despair, Dr. Monica Miller appeared. She is the Columbia University professor who guest-curated “Superfine” with Met Fashion Curator Andrew Bolton, who planned this show. Her qualifications regarding “Costume Art” made me think and look again.
“As I mentioned to you,” she said in a later email, “what is being represented here is bodily difference, ranging from size, to disability, to skin tone, etc. The mirrored mannequins are designed for all of us to see ourselves in each and every body, a poetic, empathetic gesture … athletic bodies and body-conscious dress characteristic of those of the Black women you mention, and models of color who posed for some of the mannequins made especially for this show.
“Representation” in this show is a broad category and not one tied to a specific culture and history, as was “Superfine.” The show is brilliant … because it brings the whole museum and all of its visitors into conversation.
Ultimately, I saw that they were there, too — bodies like those of relations and friends of mine, celebrated by Black British artist Thomas J. Price’s girl-from-the-hood statue, “Grounded in the Stars,” that heroically stood in Times Square last year. However, they are only present in an abstract way. Why wasn’t this fresh, powerful piece revealing just how widespread misogyny, fat-shaming, racism and self-loathing are used?
What is brilliant and redeeming about “Costume Art,” which perhaps only I feel might have been done more affectingly, with less generality, comes at its end. Children peering into a 100-color Crayola crayon box are not the only ones liable to be confused when confronted with the notion of what is the color of flesh? In the form of shoes by Christian Louboutin and other works of fashion-as-art, highlighting one of my least favorite sartorial cliches of the past 10 seasons, the answer is on full display. For most who are African Americans, our nakedness is neither black nor white. Rather, as Caroline Randall Williams elegantly expressed six years ago, we have “rape-colored skin.”
It’s provocative and powerful. Please see this show.