The costume institute and its annual gala in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the Met), have become fixtures on the museum world’s map and calendar. Whether you delight in them or are bemused by the spectacle they provide, or indeed try and take no notice at all, they are hard to ignore. The alignment they represent between fashion history, contemporary celebrity and the gravitas of a major museum is immensely beneficial in terms of fundraising and profile. 

The Met’s success in this aspect of museum life has set trends that are echoed in other institutions, which are mindful of the advantages. For example, narratives about fashion and especially its elision with performance have become a conspicuous element of the programming at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), over recent years – one only need think of the success of the David Bowie exhibition and its global tour to see this. Shows on Chanel and Dior have followed in its wake more recently in South Kensington and proven to be immensely popular; in 2023–24 the Chanel exhibition was the museum’s most popular, attracting 376,000 visitors (by contrast the great Donatello exhibition of the same year was visited by less than 50,000 visitors). The V&A’s permanent fashion gallery is about to be redeveloped and, flaunting appropriate sponsorship, become ‘The Burberry Gallery’ in 2027. 

Across the Channel, the Grand Palais in Paris has been used as you would expect, to house major art exhibitions, but for some years it has also been successfully employed as the setting for catwalk shows by many major designers. The Musée du Louvre has also recently dipped an elegant toe for the first time into such cross-fertilisation: its current Louvre Couture, Art and Fashion: Statement Piece exhibition (24th January–21st July) places modern couture by stellar designers amid its ravishing collections of historic decorative art. The Louvre does not itself have a fashion collection – whereas other institutions in Paris, such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs do – so one hundred loans are used to suggest how the museum has inspired sixty-five couturiers. Forming an impressive backdrop to such initiatives are long-standing and highly successful investments by fashion brands in their own cultural institutions, which benefit the wider economy. The Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne is perhaps the most conspicuous example – it is the host of the current and vast David Hockney 25 exhibition (9th April–31st August). Turning to Italy, comparable investment in Milan – the other great, traditional centre of European fashion – can be seen to be flourishing. This is especially evident in the programming of the Fondazione Prada. 

The New York phenomenon which is connected with all these developments is based at one level on a simple premise – the need to raise funds each spring for the Met’s Costume Institute. To achieve this Anna Wintour, the grande dame of Vogue, has revived with extraordinary success an old scenario – an annual gala or benefit party – ensuring it is the hottest ticket in town. The event makes good use of an unrivalled address book, a heavy dose of glamour and the allure of exclusivity, but also deftly ensures the world can peer in; voyeurism is key to its success. As guests to the gala arrive, they ascend red-carpeted steps to the museum and are endlessly filmed, photographed and interviewed. It is as though an Oscar ceremony has been melded with the glitz of a state visit. The more outrageous the clothes (or costumes) worn, the more likely they are to attract viral social media attention. 

The result at times might remind the sceptical of the fable of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’ however the gala undoubtedly achieves its goal and secures many tens of millions of dollars to add to the museum’s coffers. These funds are used to support the collection and programme of the institute. It was founded in 1946 and in 1959 acquired the status of a curatorial department in the museum. Its collection has gradually grown and now consists of over 35,000 objects, which range from the Renaissance to today and constitute a formidable resource for the research of fashion history. A conservation laboratory dedicated to the care of this part of the Met’s collection also forms part of the institute. The collection was enriched considerably in 2009 when the Brooklyn Museum transferred its renowned holdings of costume to it. 

Complementing this wealth of material, the annual exhibitions the institute organises, which are launched at the gala, are eagerly anticipated in the media and have included hugely successful projects, such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011), China: Through the Looking Glass (2015), Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018) and Camp: Notes on Fashion (2019). Heavenly Bodies attracted more than 1.65 million visitors to the Met Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters, a record that has not yet been beaten. This year’s exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style (10th May–26th October) will consider the phenomenon of the Black dandy, tracing it from eighteenth-century depictions to contemporary representations. 

Why should anyone take notice of all this in the more traditional fields of art history or museum and academic life? Because fashion history has become a very powerful strand of serious art-historical research, especially over the last two decades, inspiring not only exhibitions, but also a plethora of publications and university courses. We should also be alert to the benefits of the Met model because of the current environment in which funding across almost all cultural endeavours is either strained or disappearing, while here is an immensely popular conduit for philanthropy that appears to work. Interestingly, the Louvre exhibition described above was celebrated in March with the museum’s first ‘Grand Diner du Louvre’, which succeeded in raising 1 million euros. All these spotlights being trained on fashion are also perhaps noteworthy because such projects embrace young audiences and their reach extends far beyond more conventional visitor profiles for museums. 

The Met itself certainly recognises such benefits, as next year it is to open a new gallery for the Costume Institute adjacent to the museum’s Great Hall, in a (perhaps appropriately commercial) space currently taken up by the Met Store. Such a conspicuous presence in the heart of the museum signifies the importance of fashion not only to the collection and programme but also visitors’ expectations and the institution’s profile. 

A documentary film – called One Day in May – was created in 2015 to record and celebrate the creation of that year’s costume exhibition and annual gala at the Met. It recounts a tale of chaotic creative collisions, stress and ultimate triumph – which no doubt parallels the trajectory of many fashion shows and exhibitions. When a comprehensive history of the state of 21st-century museums is written this movie will be a useful document and the gala and institute will have to form a significant chapter.