Venus Williams remembers, at 14 years old, her mother sewing her first tennis skirt. “I fell in love,” Williams said at this morning’s press conference for the 2026 Met Gala and exhibition, “Costume Art.” “I fell in love with watching something come to life like that, and it gave me a deep appreciation for fashion at its core: how it’s made, how it moves, how it makes you feel, and how it tells a story. And how, a lot of times, as we’ll see, it makes history.”
Williams, who serves as a co-chair for the 2026 Met Gala, is no stranger to making history—for both her athletic prowess and her confident, expressive approach to dressing on and off the court. For that reason, she makes an ideal steward for this year’s exhibition, which explores the way fashion and art have depicted the human body, and what that, then, says about the body’s role in culture and society.
“Fashion distinguished me from my fellow players—because it was a contest,” she said with a sly smile. “About power, strength, will, skill, and being the best-dressed. And I tried to win it all. It also allowed me to connect with passionate fans across the world,” she said. “But most of all, it allowed me to connect to myself.”
From that homemade tennis skirt to full-fledged fashion icon, Williams has come to not just embrace the joys of getting dressed daily, but to understand its more profound effects. “Something that I’ve admired about clothing and dress is that it has the power to do two things,” she said. “It reminds us of the characteristics and experiences that we all share, and, at the same time, it reveals something new about ourselves and about the world around us.”
This morning’s press conference brought together luminaries of the fashion world—Thom Browne, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, and Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, among them—to not just fête the exhibition’s opening, but also the fact that it is the coming-out party for the Costume Institute’s new permanent Condé M. Nast Galleries. Relocated from a smaller location in the basement, the new space is an expansive 12,000 square feet and is located just off the museum’s Great Hall on the first floor. This move demonstrates the growing importance and influence of fashion in the hallowed halls of The Met.
“This is truly a significant moment for the institution’s history,” said Max Hollein, the museum’s director and CEO. “These new galleries—now at the heart of our two-million-square-foot building—and this magnificent exhibition clearly make a statement: fashion is art. This is, of course, something that we’ve long believed and pursued here at The Met over our 156-year history with rigor and breadth like no other museum.”
Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, weighed in on why, exactly, “Costume Art” felt like the right choice for the gallery’s debut show. “The history of art has always been, in no small measure, a history of the dressed body,” said Bolton, nattily dressed in a Thom Browne suit. “Across the museum's collection, spanning more than 5,000 years and cultures from around the world, one constant remains: the human figure. And more precisely the dressed body,” he went on. “It appears draped, wrapped, tailored, armored, incised, painted, and otherwise fashioned. Traces of lives once lived, bodies once present.”
As Williams pointed out, Bolton stressed how clothing is an opportunity to shape not just one’s body, but one’s identity. In that way, the clothed human form is a reflection both of its times and a body’s evolving place in it. Or, as Bolton noted: “Even in its absence, dress persists—in ideals of beauty, in systems of meaning, in the ways bodies are imagined and understood. Clothing is never neutral. It mediates between the self and the world, expressing who we are, where we belong, and how we wish to be seen.”
It’s for all those reasons that Bolton saw “Costume Art” as a rich, gutsy, and intellectually fecund opener for the new galleries. “At once deeply personal and profoundly social, [fashion] is woven into the very fabric of the museum’s collections. And ‘Costume Art’ begins with this premise. It implores us to see the dressed body not only as an object of representation, but as a subject of experience, a medium through which the history of art can be reimagined.”
“Costume Art” opens to the public at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 10.
