Craft Has Always Been Art

The Met opens its Costume Art exhibition to the public on May 10 and runs it through January 2027. Eight months during which the Costume Institute will make the case, across galleries spanning five thousand years, that the dressed body has always been front and center in art history. The dress code for the gala on May 4 is Fashion is Art. The argument is institutional now, which means it is visible in a way it was not before.

a Moroccan fashion house Maison Artc, women's FW20/21 collection (Milan, Italy)

There is a particular quality of noise that surrounds the Met Gala each year: the photographs, the rankings, the commentary that peaks within twenty-four hours and then dissolves entirely. The exhibition itself is quieter and more serious, and it makes a claim that the gala's spectacle almost works against: that what makes a garment significant is not its visibility on a single night but its relationship to the body, to material, to the longer history of how humans have used clothing to think and to speak. 

London-based fashion designer, Wan Hung SS17 (Milan, Italy)

The irony is that the makers for whom this argument is most true are the ones least likely to appear in the exhibition. The independent jeweler who has spent three years developing a single series, the slow fashion designer working with natural dyes and traditional construction, the textile artist whose fabric is the work, these are the people whose practice most directly demonstrates that clothing can be a form of sustained thinking and cultural inscription. Their timelines do not fit the commercial calendar. Their work does not scale, and precisely because of that, it carries the kind of material intelligence that the Costume Institute is now asking the public to recognize as art. 

Hinagata-bon (Japanese pattern books) or related Edo-period costume manuals; samurai armor (gusoku) - modular construction + textile engineering + ornament = identity system

What the moment offers, for anyone paying attention from outside the institution, is a shift in language. When the most prominent museum in the world states that fashion is art, it becomes slightly easier to explain what independent makers have been doing all along. The dressed body was always the canvas. It just took a while for the buildings to say so. 

representation of Japanese Lolita fashion; "Lady Bloom" by Japanese designer Noritaka Tatehana (2013)

Text by Kristine B; images by Lucine A