Lifestyle
Everywhere you need to be during Frieze L.A.
Frieze Los Angeles
Frieze L.A. returns to Santa Monica Feb. 26 to March 1.
(Casey Kelbaugh/Frieze/CKA)
Ah, Frieze L.A. The raison d’être for all things art-related happening here in late February. The fair can be overstimulating, but it’s still important to traverse the maze of booths at Santa Monica Airport to acquaint oneself with the best art galleries the world has to offer from Feb. 26 to March 1. Karma’s booth will feature paintings from Ernie Barnes and Milton Avery Pace will stage a never-before-seen installation by James Turrell; Hoffman Donahue is presenting its first expanded program highlighting Martine Syms; David Kordansky Gallery is showing Sam Gilliam and Lauren Halsey; and Superposition will show Greg Ito in the Focus section, among many others. frieze.com
Frieze Party at Hauser & Wirth
On Feb. 23 Hauser & Wirth is throwing a party to celebrate new shows from artist Christina Quarles and collector Eileen Harris Norton.
(Mario de Lopez/Hauser & Wirth)
Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition opening parties are always the best place to run into approximately 60% of the people you know, and the outdoor setting makes it one of the few events in L.A. where you can rock a coat that would otherwise be relegated to the shadows of your closet. The one on Feb. 23 is in celebration of the gallery’s new shows from artist Christina Quarles and collector Eileen Harris Norton. hauserwirth.com
Silencio residency at the Edition
From Feb. 24-26, Silencio is landing in West Hollywood for a three-night residency.
(Billy Farrell/BFA.com)
The legendary Parisian nightlife institution is landing in West Hollywood for a three-night residency, Feb. 24-26, where the art, fashion and music worlds will collide for a night of dancing under Sunset at Edition’s ceiling of disco balls. Tuesday night is hosted by Whitewall Magazine, Wednesday night is hosted by LACMA Avant-Garde and Enzo Los Angeles and Thursday night has How Long Gone and Tom of Finland at the helm. sunsetatedition.com
Baile World
On Feb. 27, Baile World is throwing a party celebrating Black club music for Black History Month.
(Avery Davis)
Baile World is the brainchild of founder Courtney Hollinquest, a staple of L.A.’s nightlife scene known for centering POC femmes — both in terms of the audience she curates and the DJs she books. The party on Feb. 27 is a night celebrating Black club music for Black History Month, featuring sets from Kevin Saunderson (Detroit techno legend), SHEKDASH, DJ Nico, Tromac and CQUESTT herself. Pull up to bask in the glory of genres with Black roots: techno, house and ghettotech. Tickets range from $15 to $40. ra.co
Butter Fine Art Fair
Designed to spotlight established and emerging Black artists, Butter Fine Art Fair is making its L.A. debut this week.
(Butter Fine Art)
Butter, an art fair founded five years ago in Indianapolis, is making its inaugural debut in Los Angeles at Inglewood’s Hollywood Park, running from Feb. 26-March 1. Curated by Nakeyta Moore, Kimberly Drew and Butter co-founders Malina Simone and Alan Bacon, the fair is designed to spotlight L.A.’s established and emerging Black artists. In a rare move, 100% of artwork sales go directly to the artists, showing an emphasis on accessibility and equity. Artists on view include Mr. Wash, April Bey, Autumn Breon, Micaiah Carter and many others. butterartfair.com
Post-Fair
Edgar Ramirez Jale (from “Alameda Stones” series), 2026. House paint on cardboard, mounted on canvas 12 x 12 in 30.5 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles.
(Moë Wakai)
The boutique alternative art fair founded last year by gallerist Chris Sharp is returning to its open-format venue in Santa Monica — a historic 1930s Art Deco post office (hence the name). It runs from Feb. 26-28, and features a strong list of solo presentations from galleries, including Bel Ami, CASTLE, Mariposa, Marta and others.
Felix Art Fair
Felix Art Fair booths reflect the breadth of L.A.’s art scene.
(Felix Art Fair)
The eighth edition of Felix Art Fair will take place, per usual, at the iconic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel from Feb. 26-March 1, with booths that reflect the breadth of L.A.’s art scene and a diverse collection of galleries more globally. Exhibitors from Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Milan, Seoul and London will have a presence, including ones from Chicago, Miami, Dallas, New York and our very own Los Angeles, of course. (The David Hockney pool in the center of the action is always a nice centerpiece too.) felixfair.com
Harmonia Rosales in ‘Beginnings’ at Getty Museum
“Portrait of Eve,” 2021. Harmonia Rosales (American, born 1984). Oil, gold leaf, and silver leaf on panel, 91.4 × 91.4 cm (36 × 36 in.) The Akil Family © Harmonia Rosales. Photo: Brad Kaye. L.2026.4
(The Getty Museum)
“Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages” explores how the biblical concept of Genesis has been interpreted and visualized across time, starting with artists making work during the Middle Ages. Harmonia Rosales’ Black figurative paintings combine Eurocentric artistic traditions with African diasporic cosmologies as a way to course-correct the historical erasure of Black images from classical narratives. In “Beginnings,” her contemporary works are in conversation with the Getty’s medieval illuminated manuscripts, creating a collision of past and present that broadens our understanding of origin and authorship. The exhibition runs through April 19. getty.edu
Sayre Gomez at David Kordansky
Sayre Gomez, “Family Haircuts,” 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 72 inches (243.8 x 182.9 cm).
(David Kordansky Gallery)
“Precious Moments,” is a solo show of new paintings, sculpture and video by Sayre Gomez, spanning all three of the gallery’s spaces. Gomez’s approach to observing urban life is authentic and impacted by the unreliability of memory. His large-scale, photorealistic paintings render L.A.’s visual language through tools like commercial photo retouching, Hollywood set painting and manual sign painting traditions, creating a unique commentary on image making and the city’s systems of communication. The exhibition runs through March 1. davidkordanskygallery.com
Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. at LACMA
Detail of “Fútballet,” 2018, by Lyndon J. Barrois Sr.
(Courtesy of Lyndon J. Barrois Sr)
Los Angeles-based, New Orleans-born artist and animator Lyndon J. Barrois Sr. brings action and a singular approach to art making to the museum with his solo exhibition, “Fûtbol Is Life: Animated Sportraits.” This visual history of the World Cup from 1930 to present day shows iconic moments from the sport staged with vivid detail, and is brought to life by Barrois’ miniature figures made from gum wrappers. In anticipation for the eight matches L.A. is hosting for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this show offers a wide-ranging and carefully crafted survey on the breadth of cultural representation and identities that exist within the sport globally, and commentary on the nuanced political undertones of “the beautiful game.” The exhibition runs through July 12. lacma.org
Samella Lewis at Louis Stern Fine Arts
Samella Lewis (1923-2022). “Cleo,” 1996 Ed. 31/50 II lithograph 30 x 22 inches; 76.2 x 55.9 centimeters LSFA# 15092. ©Estate of Samella Lewis. Photo: Christian Nguyen.
(Louis Stern Fine Arts)
“The Work Is Never Finished: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings” unearths the prolific work of Samella Lewis (1923-2022), an artist, educator, activist, historian and curator. Lewis kept her own practice throughout her life, even as she worked for museums and universities, founded the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles and launched the periodical, Black Art: An International Quarterly (later published as the International Review of African American Art). As a Black woman who grew up in the segregated South, she transmuted the prejudice her community faced into striking scenes of human connection, many of them sketched from memory and some rendered as linocuts. The exhibition runs through March 7. louissternfinearts.com
Takashi Murakami at Perrotin Los Angeles
Takashi Murakami, “Kitagawa Utamaro’s ‘Parody of an Imperial Carriage Scene’ Cherry Blossoms Dancing in the Air – SUPERFLAT,” 2025 – 2026. 235 x 463.8 cm. Acrylic, gold leaf and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame. ©︎2025-2026 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
(Perrotin)
A new solo exhibition by Takashi Murakami, the iconic founder of Japan’s postmodern Superflat movement, is on view at Perrotin: “Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis.” Inspired by a visit to Giverny, the village Claude Monet called home, Murakami explores ukiyo-e and Impressionism in 24 new paintings. They explore fashion, feminine sensuality, landscapes (“floating world pictures”) in a show that is as colorful as it is a nuanced commentary on how Japanese approaches to composition inspired European painters. The exhibition runs through March 14. perrotin.com
Ramsés Noriega at Marc Selwyn Fine Art
Ramsés Noriega, “La cantante de la muerte,” 1974. Acrylic on mat board, 27 1/4 x 20 inches (MSFA19775).
(Marc Selwyn Fine Art)
“Ramsés Noriega: De Sonora a Los Ángeles” includes works on paper produced by the artist, an early pioneer of the Chicano Art movement, between 1968 and 1989. A former migrant farm worker, Noriega immigrated to the United States from Sonora, Mexico, in the 1950s. He was a co-organizer of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium march in East L.A., one of the largest Mexican American anti-war demonstrations in U.S. history with an estimated 30,000 participants. Often employing caricature, distortion and symbolism to communicate anxiety and resistance, his works are personal and political, offering a critique of the systems that oppress people of color. Concurrent with this exhibition, Noriega’s work is also on view (through Feb. 28) at the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in “Fragmentos Del Barrio: A 60 Year Retrospective,” which surveys six decades of the artist’s work and activism. The exhibition at Marc Selwyn Fine Art runs through March 14. marcselwynfineart.com
Zenobia Lee at Sea View
Zenobia Lee, “Aluminum Domino II,” 2026. Cast Aluminum, 15 x 8 x 1 in (38 x 20 1/3 x 2 1/2 cm). Zenobia Lee, “Aluminum Domino III,” 2026. Cast aluminium, 20 x 9 x 1 3/4 in (50 3/4 x 23 x 4 1/2 cm). Zenobia Lee, “Aluminum Domino I.” Cast aluminum, 15 x 8 x 1 in (38 x 20 1/3 x 2 1/2 cm).
(AVN)
“Démesuré” is the debut solo exhibition of sculptor Zenobia Lee, an extension of which will be presented by the gallery in a booth of works at Frieze Los Angeles. Objects like dominos and leaves, which figure into the history of Caribbean imperialism, are fashioned from steel and wood. At once, they confront the absurdity of the relationship between absence and presence, and subvert expectations through Lee’s striking approach to scale. The exhibition runs through March 28. sea-view.us
Ash Roberts at Francis Gallery
Ash Roberts, “November Ember” (2026). Framed: 184h × 123w cm. Acrylic, oil, oil stick, gold pigment on canvas.
(Erik Benjamins)
“The Year Room” is a collection of Ash Roberts’ delicate landscape paintings, which reveal a poetic understanding of the natural world and a soft yet embodied color palette. These works are Impressionistic, displaying washes of scenes featuring elements like lily pads and flowers, some of them incorporating gold leaf as an accent in reference to the Japanese kintsugi technique. The exhibition runs through April 18. francisgallery.com
Evan Nicole Brown is a Los Angeles-born writer, editor and journalist who covers the arts and culture. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, the Cut, Fast Company, Getty Magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, the New York Times, T Magazine and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and the founder of Group Chat, a conversation series and creative salon in L.A.
Around July 4, Mena started the countdown to football season.
Stowell joined him at sports bars to watch Longhorns teams, and managed to stick it out at an early-season Texas Longhorns home football game in 105-degree heat until halftime, where he met Mena’s cousins, who had season tickets.
“It showed me willingness,” Mena said, who didn’t miss any football “away games” in November 2021 when they stayed in a Cancun villa with a satellite dish for five days with friends.
In January 2022, Mena hosted a 40th birthday party for Stowell at the Golden Goose bar in Austin, and by the end of the year, they bought a fixer-upper — a one-story bungalow just a 10-minute walk to the university’s football stadium.
“His love of sports knows no bounds,” said Stowell, with memorabilia, posters and jerseys everywhere in his house. “I had to then take the reins,” with a more subtle nod to the Longhorns. “The front door is burnt orange.”
During the renovation, in August 2023, they took a trip to the Azores and Portugal, where Stowell proposed with a gray crushed diamond band as they sat on bar stools at Pavilhão Chinês, a quirky, hidden bar in Lisbon where servers wear tuxedos.
“After the renovation is done, do you want to get married?” Stowell asked Mena pragmatically.
On April 24, Elana M. Schulman, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated the 25-minute ceremony at Assembly Hall, an events space in Austin. Their 180 guests got to choose Austin murals as backdrops for photo booth snapshots, enjoyed local Tito’s vodka and Lalo tequila margaritas, and Zed’s New Zealand-style ice cream and a taco truck.
Amanda wears writer’s monogrammed Art Lewin bespoke button down shirt, Louis Vuitton socks, duffel and luggage, Christian Dior jacket, Manolo Blahnik Mary Jane heels, DE LA GOLD necklace, rings and bracelets.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
The monogram is not something that instantly screams “Los Angeles,” though the iconic Dodgers logo — interlocking white letters on a blue hat — is one of the most memorable monograms in the world. A combination of letters signifying a person or brand feels Old World rather than the shiny new feeling that defines our casual, everyday West Coast lifestyle. A lifestyle unburned by history and more connected to the mundane and the tangible. Monograms have been around for centuries, dating all the way back to ancient Greece. They became popular symbols of royalty, and in more recent times, were adopted by the upper class for use on stationery, clothing and accessories. They’re symbols of the elite, of status and success. Monograms are luxury typed and typified. Perhaps that’s why so many luxury fashion houses have employed monograms to build their aesthetic identity. None more so than Louis Vuitton, which is celebrating the 130th anniversary of its LV logo. But why do brands and individuals alike feel so compelled to write their names on anything and everything?
The LV monogram was designed in 1896 by Georges Vuitton, the offspring of the brand’s namesake founder. The logo was created in the style of Japanese family crests, with quatrefoils embellishments and stylized flowers. It found its way onto the sumptuous luggage that became the house’s trademark. It’s been tweaked and freshened up a few times since, and became a signature of the brand’s first forays into ready-to-wear apparel under the guidance of Marc Jacobs. Unlike other luxury brands that have toyed with new logos and typefaces in the last decade, the LV monogram has carried down through the various changes in leadership at Vuitton. The latest collection from men’s creative director Pharrell Williams continues to lean heavily into that visual identity on bags, puffer jackets and sunglasses.
Monogrammed Art Lewin bespoke button down shirt, Louis Vuitton jacket, pants and bag, DE LA GOLD necklace, rings and bracelets.
It’s not hard to see why Vuitton has continued to rely on the LV emblem for its branding. Monograms are simple to understand. They communicate easily, and more literally than an abstract symbol like Nike’s Swoosh or Adidas’ Three Stripes. It’s part of why I put my initials on items like my wallet, the cuffs of my bespoke shirts, my sleepwear and my towels. It’s a way to signify ownership, but also a sense of clear identity. These objects are mine, and this is who I am.
Not everyone is compelled to spend the extra money on a monogram for their jammies, but the impulse comes from the early days of life. When your parents shuttle you off to school for the first time, practically everything you own has your name written on it — your T-shirts, pants, lunch box and water bottle. The cubby hole where your backpack (which also has your name on it) has a label to remind you which one is yours. We teach the idea of ownership to children early. This belongs to me. It’s the fundamental principle of our society. I own this. And what you own eventually defines you. The kind of car you drive, the music you listen to, the furniture you sit on. It’s impossible to separate objects from meaning because meaning in our modern world comes from objects, whether we support that notion or not.
Memories, associations and context all go into assigning value and meaning to an object. If an old girlfriend buys you a set of cocktail glasses from a flea market, those glasses will always evoke thoughts of that person. If you ordered Taco Bell at a drive-thru the day a loved one died, unfortunately, that might ruin Taco Bell for you forever. By monogramming something, the first thing you think about is you. Maybe that sounds a bit narcissistic, and I certainly have been accused of such things once or twice (sorry, I’m a writer, this is just part of it), but it’s never been more important to assert your sense of personhood and independence.
Derek Rose monogrammed pajama shirt, Louis Vuitton belted coat, Gap tank top, Nordstrom underwear, De La Gold necklace, rings and bracelets, Swedish Stockings tights.
Technology and social media and artificial intelligence have turned us into widgets or worse, vessels for “engagement.” Even if social media affords you the opportunity to put a picture of yourself and your name on your account, you’re still liable to be drowned out by the crashing wave of millions of other people doing the exact same thing. And these worlds aren’t even real, just ones and zeros merged to form a network of communication that sometimes feels like incoherent gibberish.
Monograms are ancient. They’re tangible. They can and do mean something powerful. After 130 years, the Louis Vuitton monogram still carries weight, hearkening back to an era of remarkable craftsmanship. Instead of just looking at it like a logo that’s there to adorn a sweatshirt or a water bottle, think about what it stood for at the start — the labor and artistry that built an enduring legacy. Symbols lose their value if we forget where they came from, if we lose connection with their primordial origin.
If you step into a Louis Vuitton store today, the LV monogram is omnipresent, the symbol of a powerful luxury house. But it also stands for the man who created the company, the family that helped it grow, and the craftsmanship that brought it to market. It was built by hand, with care and attention. That’s what a monogram can do. It reminds us that a human being exists, or in the case of Louis Vuitton, existed. Not just a multinational conglomerate. A person.
I don’t monogram my clothes for myself, even if it seems like it from the outside. I do it for my son, who will have nothing left of me but memories one day — memories that live inside objects. My pajamas. My towels. My shirts. My legacy. He’ll be able to wear those clothes, look at the initials on them, and say, “These were my dad’s. And I loved him.”
Photography by Brandon Kaipo Moningka
Styling by Christine Garcia
Model Amanda Sebastian
Visual Direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Fashion Direction Keyla Marquez
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photography Assistant Matchi Cervantes
Location DE LA GOLD showroom
Fashion has always sat uncomfortably in the great art institutions of the West, the question of whether it belonged under the same roof as masterworks and heroic marbles a subject of perennial debate. After all, these creations weren’t hung on a wall or put on a pedestal; they were (cue dismissive sniff) worn. They may have been a part of pop culture, but could they really be classed with high culture?
In London and Paris the answer was to relegate dress to separate museums of decorative arts — the Victoria & Albert and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. And in New York, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art may have swallowed its pride in 1946 and deigned to accept the clothes, it put the new fashion department in … the basement. Talk about a metaphor for museum hierarchies.
This week, however, the Condé M. Nast galleries, a 12,000-square-foot permanent space, is being unveiled for the Costume Institute. The galleries have replaced the former museum gift shop, just to the right of the information desk in the Great Hall. Rather than being hidden below ground, the fashion department is now the first thing people see when they enter the museum.
Shh. Listen. Hear that? It is the sound of 80 years of argument ending.
And it is a reflection of the simple fact that it is now fashion that gets people through the doors of these august — some might say old — institutions. It’s the thing everyone can relate to and comfortably opine on, unlike, say, de Kooning, because, hey, everyone wears clothes.
If in doubt, simply consider that of the 10 most-visited Met exhibitions in modern history, half of them were Costume Institute exhibitions. No other department is represented more than once. Or consider “Costume Art,” the exhibition that opens the new space.
This year’s fashion blockbuster — the one celebrated by the Met Gala on Monday night — “Costume Art” both acknowledges fashion’s role as the new entry point to the museum and makes the case for why the change is long overdue. It’s as if the exhibition were holding out its hand and saying to all who enter, “Hello, let me be your guide to the treasures we have throughout this place.”
The show suggests that fashion — or “the dressed body” — is the essential connective tissue of the 17 different departments and 19 collecting areas of the Met, the one element present in every discipline, no matter what century or art form is under discussion. It does this by pairing approximately 200 garments and accessories with 200 pieces of art borrowed from across the museum’s six miles of galleries.
You see the connection from the moment you enter the soaring new space, through an anteroom just off the Great Hall, dedicated to what is now termed “naked dressing.” Think Dilara Findikoglu’s 2023 sheer dress with strategically placed coils of hair, like Lady Godiva fashion cosplay, paired with an 18th century Venetian bronze nude, the hands strategically placed just like the hair. That’s one way to hook ‘em.
The Museums Special Section
It’s no accident that the entry also includes a double-sided vitrine that houses four mannequins. Two of them face outward toward the grand staircase and wear sheer body stockings, one by Vivienne Westwood and one by Andrea Adamo, each with a silver fig leaf over their nether regions. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, has never been afraid of playing to the crowd.
Created by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the architecture firm Peterson Rich, which also designed the exhibition, the galleries have been conceived to fit seamlessly into the existing semiology of the museum. They are floored in white granite, replete with classic pedestals and platforms, and bathed in a soft glow (since fabric is too fragile to be exposed to daylight, this has been created by recessed uplighting). It’s as if the new galleries had always been there; as if fashion had always belonged.
Rather than dress up the exhibition with fancy scenography, or guest film directors as Bolton has often done in the past, the space allows the interplay between fashion and the rest of the galleries to sit front and center. It is, after all, a relatively straightforward idea: an Issey Miyake molded gold breastplate and a mini-me Etruscan cuirass! A Fortuny pleated Delphos gown and a Greek terra-cotta vase featuring a figure in a pleated gown! A Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons armless felted construction and a stone Henry Moore with the exact same curves.
And really, it’s hard to argue with the connection between Van Gogh’s “Irises” and the Yves Saint Laurent jacket that reproduced that painting in sequins, or the Loewe shirt by Jonathan Anderson that did the same on a feather-festooned couture version of a concert tee.
But such banal relationships are actually few and far between in the show, which is after something deeper and more complicated. There is, thankfully, no Mondrian “Broadway Boogie Woogie” with matching dresses in the exhibition; no Warhol soup cans and Warhol soup can shifts.
Warhol is represented, natch, but by a Richard Avedon portrait of the artist’s bullet-scarred torso, juxtaposed against a Coperni dress, its slashes resected with silver spirals. Even those Van Gogh irises turn out to be linked not just by flowers, but by the mental health struggles of the men who made the works, the way both the designer Chet Lo’s gowns covered in little knit spikes and Picasso’s “The Blind Man’s Meal” reflect the importance of tactile understanding.
Indeed, the organizing principle of the show, rather than chronology, is the body itself: both the kinds of bodies that distinguish us, and the bodily experiences we share. And that is the product of a fairly radical rethinking of how fashion relates to art.
For decades, the justifications for considering fashion as an art form involved denaturing it, separating it from its practical purpose and corporeal reality, and focusing instead on its textile value — embroidery, beading, decoration — or its construction. With this show, Bolton is slyly subverting that idea, suggesting instead that it is fashion’s dependence on the body itself that makes it central to any and all art practices: That the real connective issue between fashion and art is the way in which both are used to challenge and shape perception — of the body, of beauty; of who we are and how we see. Understanding the one helps to understand the other.
That’s why the clothes in this exhibition often sit atop the art, a subtle upending of the traditional status quo that speaks to both Bolton’s thesis and the department’s new status. It’s also why the exhibit layout serves to guide you through a maze of bodily types in its two main galleries, the Thom Browne gallery, and the Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere gallery. Among them are the classical body, the corpulent body, the disabled body, the pregnant body, the inscribed body, the anatomical body and the mortal body.
(The terminology, the product of consultation with different interest groups, can be a little abstruse, but the taxonomy has led to one real change: the creation of mannequins beyond the unrealistically thin and sylphlike.)
You don’t have to get any of this to enjoy the show, of course. It may be less magical than some Costume Institute shows such as 2011’s “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” 2018’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and even last year’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” But it is delightful to happen upon an unexpected treasure, such as a miniature Egyptian Omphale figure that seems to glow from within, or Fred Tomaselli’s 1992 work “Behind Your Eyes,” a life-size male nude with a body built out of pills that the Met acquired in 2019 but that has never been shown. Or, for that matter, to discover the beauty in the blood red venous structures of a Robert Wun gown, like a flayed dress.
The fashion masters (Worth, Vionnet, Kawakubo and so on) are all here, sure, like the old masters, but so are many more names most people will not know. As a sign of what sort of role fashion is going to play in the Met going forward, “Costume Art” is a clear statement of intent.
The last room in the exhibition acts as a bookend to the first, focusing not on nudity, but on skin itself before disgorging visitors into the Byzantine galleries. Anders Bergstrom’s wrenching “Brown Bag Test,” which wrestles with early-20th-century racism and the way skin tones were used for discrimination, is there, along with Christian Louboutin’s set of “Hot Chick” stiletto shoes in eight different shades of nude. Both are set against the backdrop of the original brick and concrete outer wall of the Met, which was hidden when the Great Hall and grand entry staircase were added in 1902.
The wall was uncovered when the gift shop was demolished, and it has been left in its original state, as if to remind you that it, too, has been here all along. It’s just that, like the foregrounding of fashion in art, it took this long for everyone to realize it. Now that they have, there is room for an even more interesting question: What’s next?
Cinematography by Jensen Gore.
Costume Art
Members Preview, May 5, 7-9; opens May 10 — Jan. 10, 2027, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.
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