On the first Monday of May, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art once again became the most closely observed stage in fashion. Before entering the exhibitions, guests of the ball ascended the red carpet in carefully constructed looks framed by this year’s dress code: “Fashion is Art.”
At first glance, it may have seemed like one of the most abstract dress codes in recent Met Gala history – not only because it is broad, but simply because it is too broad. The question of “is fashion art?” has persisted for as long as fashion and art have existed, resisting any definitive resolution.
“Fashion is Art” is a bold and seductive statement. It promises clarity, yet consistently produces ambiguity. For centuries, fashion has circled as the category of art: exhibited in museums, interpreted by critics, and elevated through spectacle. However, fashion is never fully absorbed into art. As professor Giovanni Matteucci and assistant professor Stefano Marino (2017) observe in Introduction: Philosophical Perspectives on Fashion, "there have been various attempts during the last two centuries to find a solution for the question concerning the ‘artistry,’ i.e., the artistic status of fashion.”
On May 4, 2026, guests of the Met Gala interpreted “Fashion is Art” in increasingly elaborate ways. However, the event did not resolve the debate. It staged it once again.
Guests were given a non-easy task to resolve this debate. The red carpet became a global performance in which garments were expected to function not only as clothing, but as statements, symbols, and, perhaps, artworks. And while Emma Chamberlain, as a Vogue's special correspondent, opened the night in the stunning custom Mugler look by Miguel Castro Freitas, which was hand-painted by artist Anna Deller-Yee, turning her body into a canvas; more guests showed that fashion is an utilitarian domain that is meant to be worn and comfortable.
As the director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Valerie Steele, once put it: “Is fashion art? The perennial question.”
If we dare to search for its resolution, we must confront a more debated question that has occupied philosophers, critics, and artists for centuries: what is art?
Across disciplines, definitions of art have long been debated. The Definition of Art by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states: “Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated.” However, some approaches expand their boundaries almost indefinitely.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For instance, Joseph Beuys, a central figure in post-war conceptual art, famously suggested that “even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.” In this formulation, art emerges from the act itself, dissolving the distinction between artistic and everyday practices. Such a definition renders the category of art nearly limitless. Thus, even objects produced within commercial systems may be framed as art. Within this logic, one might momentarily consider both Bad Bunny’s Zara look and Yu-chi Lyra Kuo’s custom Jean Paul Gaultier gown inspired by the Greek sculpture Nike of Samothrace as participating in an artistic field. However, this very expansiveness risks rendering the category of art indistinguishable from everyday production.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A very different position articulated by Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgment (1790), where he defines fine art as the "art of genius," a form of creation that appears purposive yet is not directed towards practical ends. In this view, fine art is autonomous: it is not made to function, to sell, or to serve an external purpose, but to cultivate aesthetic judgement. Such a definition implicitly separates art from domains structured by utility and commerce, placing it in tension with practices like fashion, which remain embedded in systems of production and consumption.
The most sculptural and conceptually ambitious looks of the evening appeared to approach Kant’s notion of "purposiveness without purpose."
Such included Hailey Bieber in a Saint Laurent dress, inspired by the work of Yves Saint Laurent himself for the SS02 collection, or Kim Kardashian, who worked with a British pop artist – best known for his paintings, sculptures, and lithography – Allen Jones, to create custom body armour, echoing the portrait that features Kate Moss wearing a dazzling gold-flake body cast sculpture, originally created by Jones in 1978 for an unreleased film project.
Yet, these works never fully achieve autonomy. Their apparent aesthetic independence remains inseparable from the systems that produce and circulate them: branding, media visibility, and the accumulation of cultural capital. What appears as art is still structurally bound to purpose.
A similar dynamic can be observed in looks that directly reference canonical artworks. Madonna’s appearance drew on the painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony," while Amy Sherald referenced her own artwork "Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)" (2014). Hunter Schafer and Gracie Abrams, in turn, evoked the visual language of Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. Such gestures do not transform fashion into autonomous art objects, they operate as citations. The body becomes a site through which art is referenced, translated, and re-performed, reinforcing proximity without collapsing the boundary between the two domains.
Bourdieu further emphasised that cultural forms are organised through hierarchies shaped by class, taste, and economic structures. The author shows that different forms of art are valued differently depending on their position within social systems. A similar logic can be observed in fashion, where haute couture, ready-to-wear, and mass production occupy distinct positions within a structured hierarchy. Through this lens, fashion emerges as a cultural practice shaped by power, taste, and distinction.
Applied to fashion, this perspective only complicates the question. Garments do not become “fashion” solely by virtue of their material form, they are positioned as such within a system of institutions, media, and audiences that assign them meaning and value. In a similar way, certain forms of fashion, particularly those presented within museums, exhibitions, or highly mediatised events such as the Met Gala, may be perceived as art when they are collectively framed and received as such. This does not dissolve the distinction between fashion and art, but it demonstrates how the boundary between them is actively produced rather than naturally given.
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art//Courtesy Lùchen
A particularly revealing example was Lauren Sánchez’s appearance, which explicitly referenced Madame X. At first glance, such a citation appears to align fashion with the tradition of fine art, invoking canonical imagery associated with aesthetic autonomy. However, within the context of the Met Gala, this gesture operates less as an instance of "art for its own sake" in the Kantian sense, and more as a strategic deployment of cultural capital.
The presence of Jeff Bezos as co-chair of the Met Gala intensifies this dynamic. Here, aesthetic reference, celebrity visibility, and economic power converge, demonstrating precisely the structure described by Bourdieu: cultural legitimacy is not inherent, but produced through the alignment of institutional authority and capital. Rather than dissolving the boundary between art and fashion, such moments reveal how the category of “"art" is mobilised within systems of power.
This is where the discussion around the oft-cited remark by fashion designer and creative director, Karl Lagerfeld, becomes particularly revealing. When he stated “Art is Art. Fashion is Fashion,” the intention appeared clearly: to draw a strict boundary between the two domains, rejecting any overlap between them. However, this distinction is frequently re-interpreted in critical discourse. Commentators emphasise that Lagerfeld’s work was influenced by artistic references, visual culture, and historical art movements, thereby re-absorbing his practice into the very category he seemed to reject. As writer, researcher and cultural historian Kai Toussaint Marcel writes in the reflection on The Met Gala’s 2023 exhibition, Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, “despite his claims about fashion and art, Lagerfeld’s propensity to interweave disparate modes of creative production demonstrates the fundamental permeability between these discursive categories.”
In this process, “art” operates as a flexible resource which can be invoked, resisted, and re-assigned depending on context. It is precisely within this logic that institutional statements such as those surrounding the Met Gala become significant. When fashion is declared to be art within such a setting, the claim produces a specific cultural framing of what fashion is allowed to mean in that moment.
The relationship between fashion and art becomes even more complex when we consider how fashion designers define who they are and what they do. Do they consider themselves artists, or are they positioned as such by external discourse? As already suggested through Karl Lagerfeld’s canonical formulation, “Art is Art. Fashion is fashion,” some of fashion’s most influential figures have actively resisted the collapse of the two categories, insisting on maintaining a structural distinction between them. Similarly, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Miuccia Prada reject the label “artist,” framing fashion instead as an industrial and everyday practice embedded within systems of production, consumption, and cultural circulation. They openly deny that fashion is art.
This tension becomes particularly visible in the case of Gigi Hadid’s custom Miu Miu gown. While the look was presented within a dress code that explicitly framed fashion as art, its alignment with that claim remains unstable. If Miuccia Prada, the founder of MiuMiu, herself resists the categorisation of fashion as art, then the meaning of such a look cannot be located in authorial intention alone. Instead, it emerges from the context in which it is staged and received.
From this perspective, the look does not simply “become” art through design. Rather, it is positioned as such within a system structured by visibility, prestige, and cultural authority. This dynamic aligns closely with Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that cultural value is produced through relations of class, taste, and economic capital. What appears as artistic legitimacy is not an intrinsic quality of the garment, but the effect of the social conditions that frame it.
As Valerie Steel, who also stands by the opinion that fashion is not art, notes, “For fashion to be art, it would seem necessary, not only for fashion designers, but also for painters, sculptors, gallerists, collectors, art curators, etc., to acknowledge fashion as art.” From this perspective, the legitimacy for some might be defined collectively.
In Art as Experience (1934) an American philosopher and psychologist John Dewey argued that the institutionalisation of art within museums and galleries had distanced it from everyday life, placing authority in the hands of experts rather than those who encounter and experience it. For Dewey, art does not reside solely in objects or in institutional recognition, but in the aesthetic experience itself in the interaction between a work and its perceiver.
Viewed through this lens, the question of whether fashion is art shifts once again. If art emerges through experience rather than institutional validation, then fashion may operate aesthetically in ways that exceed traditional definitions of art. It is precisely within this space that some fashion designers still regard themselves as artists. Think only about John Galliano, who, during his tenure at Maison Margiela, focused on "Artisanal" collections, which are regarded as the highest form of craftsmanship, emphasising emotion and mood. Still, last night Galliano showed his artisanal view on fashion through his first work in collaboration with fast fashion retailer Zara, which sends us back to the controversy around “fashion is art” statement.
The presence of Robert Wun at this year’s Gala proves this point. His creations orchestrated the red carpet, becoming the spotlight of the night. Worn by figures such as Jordan Roth, Lisa, Naomi Osaka, Audrey Nuna, Nichapat Suphap, Gustav Magnar Witzoe, and Ananya Birla, his garments moved through the Gala as sculptural statements rather than mere attire.
More significantly, Wun’s work extended beyond the spectacle of the evening itself: three of his pieces were added to the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this moment, the boundary between fashion presentation and institutional validation briefly collapsed, as garments transitioned from performance to preservation — from red carpet to archive.
Images Robert Wun
Thierry Mugler often considered himself a "director" rather than a designer, stating that he believed fashion "had to be shown in its musical and theatrical environment." One could also add Jean Paul Gaultier, Daniel Roseberry, Robert Wun, and many other designers to those whose work could stand in art galleries.
Jonathan Anderson creates his designs through close exploration of art, stating that he thinks "more like a conceptual artist." He often describes his process as "directing in objects" or "curating". During his work at Loewe, Anderson shared in the interview for Gagosian Quarterly with an American writer Derek Blasberg that he wanted to build “a platform that was trying to break down the barriers between craft and art and fashion.” This desire grew into the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, an annual international award launched in 2016 to celebrate excellence, innovation, and artistic merit in modern craftsmanship.
Notice how Anderson talks about “collaborating with art” and “blurring the boundaries between art and fashion,” positioning fashion not as an art form, but as something separated. There are boundaries between the two –– they must be blurred in order to create something interesting and new.
Perhaps Sabrina Carpenter’s custom Dior by Anderson look inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s 1954 movie Sabrina acts as precisely such an act of boundary-blurring: a translation of cinematic memory into fashion form that gestures toward art, while still remaining embedded within the representational and commercial logic of dress.
Alexander McQueen also cultivated a deep relationship with the art world. His collections frequently drew from art history, to mention a few: the fifteenth-century painting by Flemish painter, Robert Campin, appeared in McQueen’s Fall/Winter 1997 collection, while the ethereal angels of Sandro Botticelli and the haunting demons of Hieronymus Bosch inspired the visual language in his very last collection. McQueen never denied this creative dialogue with art. In 2006 he established a charitable foundation, Sarabande, named after his Spring/Summer 2007 show. The goal was and is to support the most creatively fearless minds of the future, providing scholarships, studios, and mentorship to emerging artists. In this way, McQueen extended his vision beyond fashion itself, building an institutional bridge between fashion and art. Even though actress Daisy Edgar-Jones wore a custom Alexander McQueen look designed by Seán McGirr, the gesture read more as the performance of a legacy brand than a full articulation of McQueen’s artistic vision.
In this sense, the designers considered here do not collectively answer what fashion is. Instead, they demonstrate how fashion continuously produces and regulates its own proximity to art. The label of “artist” becomes less an identity than a position within a cultural system that is itself defined by tension: between industry and autonomy, production and authorship, commerce and cultural value. And it means that fashion does not resolve into “art” or “non-art.” Perhaps it operates between the constant movement between the two.
However, this claim is not produced by a single structure. It emerges through the interaction of two interconnected yet fundamentally different mechanisms: the annual exhibition organised by the Costume Institute, a curatorial department that focuses on fashion and costume design, and the Met Gala itself. The exhibition operates as a curatorial project, developed by scholars and curators, which situates fashion within art-historical discourse and museum space. The Gala, by contrast, is a fundraising event and a highly mediated spectacle, in which celebrities interpret a dress code aligned with the exhibition’s theme.
While the exhibition constructs fashion as art through curatorial framing and institutional discourse, the Gala amplifies this claim through visibility, celebrity culture, and global media curation. They operate together, but they do not produce meaning in the same way.
The idea that fashion belongs to the realm of art appears almost settled within major cultural institutions. Nowhere is this move more visible than at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last night showed it in its full potential.
However, some guests attempted to merge these two registers directly, turning the body itself into the site of the artwork. As the exhibition foregrounds the relationship between clothing and corporeality, these interpretations pushed the logic further, staging the body not as a wearer of art, but as its material form. One of the most striking appearances was Heidi Klum, who literally embodied a sculpture, referencing Veiled Vestal. Speaking to Ashley Graham and Cara Delevingne on the Vogue livestream, she summarised her choice with the phrase: “Fashion is Art – Art is Fashion. Yes or yes?”
Nevertheless, the authority of this claim cannot be understood without considering the structure that produces it. Established in 1948 by an American fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert as a fundraising event for the Costume Institute, the Met Gala has since evolved into a highly controlled intersection of fashion, celebrity, and institutional power. Its transformation was solidified in 1995, when Anna Wintour assumed a leading role, re-shaping the event through the lens of Vogue into a curated convergence of designers, models, actors, and cultural elites. Under her direction, the Gala has become more than a social event. The Met Gala has become a place in which fashion is framed, evaluated, and elevated within a hierarchy of cultural value.
The Met Gala can be understood as a contemporary analogue to elite social rituals such as nineteenth-century court balls, where dress functioned as a visible marker of status, taste, and belonging. In both cases, clothing operates as a coded language through which hierarchy is displayed and negotiated. What distinguishes the Met Gala is the scale of its visibility: the ritual is no longer confined to an exclusive social circle but broadcast globally, transforming elite distinction into a widely consumed spectacle.
At the same time, the event remains widely criticised for its entanglement with elite culture and extreme wealth, raising questions about who has the authority to define what counts as art, and on what terms. The concentration of cultural and economic capital within the Gala reinforces the very hierarchies that Pierre Bourdieu describes, complicating any reading of fashion’s elevation into art as a neutral or purely aesthetic process.
Only one guest appeared to intervene directly in this dynamic. Sarah Paulson wore a grey tulle gown by Matières Fécales, paired with white opera gloves and a money blindfold. The look belonged to the AW27 collection titled “The One Percent,” explicitly engaging with critiques of contemporary capitalism and its uneven structures of value. In the context of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez serving as key co-chairs and sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala, the gesture read less as decoration than as interruption — a reminder that the meanings produced on the red carpet remain inseparable from the structures that stage them.
From a theoretical perspective, the dynamic aligns closely with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who argued that cultural value is not inherent but produced through systems of belief, authority, and distinction. The Met Gala concentrates these elements within a single event. It gathers individuals endowed with cultural capital, situates them within an institution that confers artistic legitimacy, and circulates their images through media networks that amplify their symbolic power. Within such a configuration, the claim that fashion is art does not emerge as objective truth, but as a collectively produced belief sustained by the structures that support it.
The red carpet thus operates as a site where garments are interpreted, judged, and elevated within a system that temporarily aligns fashion with the logic of art. Yet this alignment remains contingent, dependent on context, framing, and recognition rather than on any intrinsic transformation of fashion itself. Janelle Monáe, for instance, appeared in a custom Christian Siriano look constructed from electrical cables, moss, succulents, and circuit-board fragments, evoking a post-apocalyptic synthesis of technology and nature. As an aesthetic object, it readily invites an art reading; yet that reading remains a matter of positioning — whether one frames it as fashion, technology, or art depends on the interpretive system applied to it.
In light of the previous night, the red carpet, which was actually somewhere between yellowish and greenish tones, described by Vogue as “drawing on Renaissance design, the goal was to create a romantic atmosphere in which guests are immersed in a scene fit for a work of art” – becomes less a backdrop than a carefully constructed interpretive frame. Within this setting, the Met Gala does not resolve the question of whether fashion is art – it stages it, performs it, and repeatedly returns it to circulation.
With all of that said, the statement “Fashion is Art” last night was not a concluding sentence in the debate. The problem lies not in the answer, but in the question itself. Italian sociologist and associate professor Marco Pedroni argues that one must not view fashion as a superficial correlate of social stratification or as a mechanistic protocol of temporal regulation.
Fashion is art if it is framed as such. It is not, if that framing is removed. Art itself is not a fixed category either: it can be functional, institutional, hierarchical, or experiential. Perhaps fashion operates in the same way. Or perhaps it is constantly asked to choose a position it was never designed to settle into.
