The Met Gala dress code is 'Fashion is Art'. But is it?

Let the elitist art pearl-clutching or eye-rolling commence, because the dress code for this evening’s Met Gala fundraiser (formally called the Costume Institute Benefit) is ‘Fashion is Art’.

While I brace myself for how this is an invitation for attendees to subject us to their most deranged Hunger Games: Picasso Painting Cosplay, the theme itself is a welcome comment from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on the recurring question of whether fashion is, in fact, art.

Regularly overlooked as an art form in its own right, fashion is often told to stay in its ephemeral runway lane and not entertain illusions of art grandeur. We hail its encounters with fine art — Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist collaboration with Salvador Dalí or the era-defining meetings between Louis Vuitton and artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Takashi Murakami during Marc Jacobs’ tenure at the brand — but hesitate to call fashion actual art.

Because fashion occupies itself with how we look in this world, it is inevitably thought of as frivolous and undeserving of sharing in art’s divine light. Decorative arts are increasingly acknowledged and revered for producing spectacular objects of art, but fashion isn’t taken quite as seriously. Since fashion has historically been framed as a female subject, do we perhaps also detect an air of sexism here?

What further complicates the matter is that fashion is — gasp — a patently commercial enterprise. Pack your bejewelled Chanel celestial globe minaudière and be gone, you immoral creature.

It is frankly silly to be so miserly with the art label, especially when the late Alexander McQueen’s cabinet of deliciously unnerving curiosities exists, or Iris Van Herpen’s visionary haute couture that floats in a realm of alien biology and tech sculpture. It’s probably not the done fashion thing to disagree with Rei Kawakubo, high priestess of the avant garde Comme des Garçons, but I must insist her work is also art, even if she herself says it isn’t. Her ‘not quite clothes’ and strange shapes continue to tickle fashion brains in a way that is distinctly art gallery-coded.

As someone who has been writing about fashion for 25 years, this is essentially what my wholly subjective and completely unquantifiable litmus test for whether fashion is art boils down to: does it engage something in my mind or offer interesting cultural commentary? Does it make me feel something or ask questions? Like The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, does it draw me in with some inexplicable power and intrigue?

While I adore Yves Saint Laurent (tortured artist personified, with stupendously good taste) and will never say a bad word about his famous 1965 Mondrian dresses, I think fashion as an art form fares best when it isn’t a literal canvas for fine art. (Another exception here being Alexander McQueen’s live robot spray-painting of a dress for Spring/Summer 1999).

It doesn’t necessarily mean something as conceptual as Hussein Chalayan’s famous wooden coffee table dress. It can be a sculptural Balenciaga or Dior dress. Or Martin Margiela’s incognito sunglasses from Spring/Summer 2008 that wrap around the face like a blacked-out censorship bar in a comment on anonymity and identity. Or hats-as- modern-art by clever milliners such as Stephen Jones and Noel Stewart.

To me, fashion easily slots into visual arts and, when done well with fashion shows, performing arts as well. I am still unbearably envious of those who attended John Galliano’s final Artisanal Spring/Summer 2024 show for Maison Margiela in Paris, where glass-skinned models including actor Gwendoline Christie were cinched in skin-like corsetry and prostheses under layers of Belle Époque romance. Truly a show that transcended fashion and placed it firmly in art and theatre, like a Toulouse Lautrec painting come to life in its own otherworldly form.

With this year’s Costume Institute exhibition at the Met titled Costume Art, the museum cements fashion’s value and meaning as an art form. Artworks of dressed bodies from the museum’s collections have been paired with clothing pieces, conversing across mediums with a shared language. And isn’t that what both art and fashion are: an inherently social and communal experience that helps us relate to one another, in the vein of what Leo Tolstoy called a 'means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings' in his 1897 book What is Art?.

Both reflect our world and also shape it. And because fashion moves so fast, it can sometimes verbalise cultural shifts long before other disciplines.

The Met’s stance on fashion as art is also quite literally represented in how the Costume Institute has moved up in the world, from its former basement location to a 12,000 square foot gallery space adjacent to the Great Hall. My art professor from my time at university would surely approve. He would tell us that art and fashion are fundamentally bound to one another, and if we were ever unsure about the era of an artwork, we should simply look at what the people depicted in it were wearing. Carbon dating by garment, basically.

We are well into the age of the blockbuster fashion retrospective, where an exhibition like the Met’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination drew more than 1.65 million visitors in 2018. This year, I would highlight the MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp’s new show on the Antwerp Six, which takes an academic-leaning look at the mythical Belgian group of avant garde designers who have shaped fashion with their intellectual, poetic and artistic sensibilities.

Labels and clear definitions are convenient. They help us to quickly make sense of things and understand where they sit in a wider context. But insisting on a clear divide between fashion and art seems somewhat uptight and outdated when they clearly overlap in so many ways. We can probably agree that cinema is an art form, but not all cinema is art. How is fashion any different? The distaste for calling fashion art becomes even more absurd when we are being bombarded with the glaring oxymoron that is ‘AI art’.

If you feel you can’t possibly commit to the art tag for fashion, may I simply propose ‘fashion art’ for any pieces that feel like that? German artist Joseph Beuys, who was known for his ‘extended definition of art’, once noted in an interview: 'Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.' Here’s to the fashion artists who can really peel the clothing version of a potato.