Next Year’s Met Gala Theme Is All About Bodies

This morning, inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Great Hall — in front of a crowd that included Thom Browne, Vera Wang, Michael Kors, Derek Blasberg, and, naturally, Anna Wintour — Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met, and Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Met’s Anna Wintour Costume Center, announced the theme for next year’s Costume Institute exhibition: “Costume Art.” The exhibition will explore what Bolton later called the “dress body,” a study of how garments are inherently art owing to their “relation to the body.”

The exhibition will pair 200 pieces of art with roughly 200 garments and accessories in a similar fashion, hoping to bridge the gap between fashion and fine art. A few samples of what this collection will entail were on display in the room: Georgina Godley’s pregnancy dress displayed alongside photographer Harry Callahan’s Eleanor (an image of his pregnant wife’s stomach); Walter Van Beirendonck’s Ensemble (a scribbled-on skintight suit of the idealized male form, six-pack and all) next to a 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve; and a sheer lace Givenchy dress next to a Japanese sketchbook, filled with doodles of skeletons, from 1881.

This year’s sponsors are Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a departure from the precedent of having a storied fashion house serve as the primary sponsor. (Last year, it was Louis Vuitton.) The Bezoses are not new to the sponsorship game — Amazon Fashion has also sponsored the CFDAs since 2022, and one of this year’s hosts, Teyana Taylor, notably gave a shout-out to Amazon’s two-day shipping in her opening remarks. For the 2026 exhibition, Saint Laurent and Condé Nast will serve as secondary sponsors.

Hollein also used the moment to announce the museum’s plans to open the Condé M. Nast Galleries, a nearly 12,000-square-foot gallery off the Great Hall where the Costume Institute will be showing its exhibitions going forward; “Costume Art” will serve as the inaugural one. Hollein noted the significant gift from the media giant Condé Nast, home of Vogue and Wintour herself, that made the $50 million expansion possible.

Afterward, Misty Copeland, who just retired from her role as principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, talked about “the Black and brown bodies of dancers who have been overlooked” in her speech, promising that the forthcoming exhibition from the Met “makes a powerful case for all bodies to be celebrated.”

While the dress code for the exhibition’s accompanying Met Gala has yet to be announced, this theme sounds like a siren call for sheer “naked” dresses. Also likely to end up on the carpet: garments featuring internal organs or gowns imitating the draping on near-nude marble statues. Brands that have frequently drawn inspiration from and even mimicked the human body, like Schiaparelli or Robert Wun, are sure to dominate, and showing up entirely nude will not be out of the question. Will someone be bold enough to dress as “Bodies … the Exhibition”? We’ll find out on the first Monday in May.