Exhibition Notes: The Dressed Body: A Photo Essay from Costume Art at The Met | June 14, 2026

Jun 14
3 min read

I found Costume Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art absolutely stunning. The bright, luminous galleries create a calm and visually unified environment in which garments and artworks from different periods, styles, subjects, and tones seem to speak naturally to one another. Despite their remarkable variety, everything works beautifully together.

Costume Art is not simply an exhibition about fashion. It is an exhibition about the body: how it is shaped, concealed, idealized, exposed, disciplined, and reinvented through dress. Moving through the galleries, I was struck by the conversations created between garments and objects from across The Met’s collection. Sometimes the connections appear through color, texture, pattern, or silhouette. At other moments, they are psychological or political, asking us to consider which bodies art and fashion have traditionally represented and which they have overlooked.

In these pairings, clothing no longer seems secondary or merely decorative. Fashion is presented not simply as something worn, but as a way of shaping, revealing, disguising, and reimagining the human form. Dress becomes sculpture, architecture, image, identity, and an extension of the body itself. What follows is a selection of pairings that remained with me, each revealing a different relationship between dress, art, and the body.

The Body Shaped

Corsets and structured garments transform the body into architecture. The natural figure is not simply dressed; it is reorganized into a desired silhouette.

Dress: Designer Charles James ca. 1956

Corsets: (top left) Manufacturer The H. & W. Company, ca. 1908

(top right) Manufacturer Attributed to Royal Worcester Corset Company, ca. 1902

(bottom) Design House House of Dior: Designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, Designer Elina Chauvet, 2024 haute couture

Art: Untitled (Birth Prints A, B, C), Luchita Hurtado. Printer Jacob Samuel. Publisher Hauser & Wirth, 2019

The Body Revealed

Here, the garment turns the body inside out. What is normally hidden beneath the skin becomes pattern, ornament, and spectacle.

Dress: Design House Alexander McQueen: Designer Sarah Burton, spring/summer 2024

Tabulae Anatomicae: Author Written by Barth. Eustachius, 1728

"Corset Anatomia": Designer Renata Buzzo, spring/summer 2025

Art: Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams, Govert Bidloo, 1728

The Body Idealized

The painted sitter and the dresses beside her share a carefully constructed ideal of femininity. Fabric,

posture, volume, and gesture work together to produce a social image of the body.

Dresses : Design House Worth and Bobergh, Designer Charles Frederick Worth, 1862–65

"Eugénie": Design House House of Dior, Designer Christian Dior, fall/winter 1948–49

Art: Countess Alexander Nikolaevitch Lamsdorff (Maria Ivanovna Beck, 1835–1866), Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1859

The Body Reclaimed

Sinéad O’Dwyer’s garment does not smooth the body into an abstract ideal. Like Irving Penn’s photograph, it preserves weight, pressure, folds, and physical presence. The body is not corrected; it is acknowledged.