The first Monday in May is here, which means the Met Gala carpet is about to become the most overanalyzed runway in the world. This year’s dress code is “Fashion is Art,” which sounds simple enough until you remember how easy it is to turn that into a painting printed on a dress. The more interesting question is not whether fashion can reference art. Of course it can. The question is what happens when fashion behaves like art - when it changes how a body moves, how a material carries memory, or how an entrance becomes an image.
Curator Andrew Bolton said he wanted to showcase fashion’s “materiality and the indivisible connection between our bodies and the clothes we wear” over its visuality. In other words: the point isn’t how fashion looks next to art. The point is how it feels on a body.
Here’s what I’ll be watching for on the carpet.
The Obvious References
These references are classic fashion-meets-art. You may see a Mondrian dress. Someone will reference Warhol. At least one person will show up looking like a picture frame, which Viktor & Rolf already did perfectly in 2015 when they unhooked jacquard paintings off a wall at the Palais de Tokyo and draped them onto models as garments.
These are on the nose, not wrong, but not joyfully right (I mean if you got your pretty paws on one of the six Mondrian YSL dresses ever made, then yes, please wear it).
Painterly Dresses
The obvious move is to put a famous painting on a dress. The better move is to make the dress feel painted: brushstrokes, smears, raw edges, layered color, fabric that looks worked by hand.
Dries Van Noten has done this for decades, and it never feels like costume. His AW09 womenswear came from a Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain — he transposed Bacon’s shrimp pinks, ochers, and mauves directly into textiles. His SS09 menswear was built entirely around Elizabeth Peyton’s painting Democrats are More Beautiful. He’s pulled from Rothko, Vasarely, Van Dyck. The references stack and collide, but they always resolve into something you’d actually want to wear. Now retired, he’s opened a foundation inside a 15th-century Venetian palazzo dedicated to handmade craft. He lives with art the way most people live with furniture.
Designer Raf Simons and artist Sterling Ruby are the stronger version of the art-fashion collaboration. Simons developed fabrics from Ruby’s paintings for his first Dior couture show in 2012. The 2014 collection looked like two people working in the same visual language with patchwork coats, paint-splattered suits, stuffed American flag sculptures, and clothes that carried the mess and charge of the studio.
On the historical end: Sonia Delaunay’s “Simultaneous Dress” (1913) was a patchwork of contrasting fabrics based on her painting theory. Apollinaire called it “a living painting.” She later designed a Citroen car to match her coat. The dress as canvas has been here for over a century.
Surrealism on the Body
No art movement has understood fashion better than Surrealism. Surrealism treats the body the same way fashion does - as something unstable, part object, part dream, part joke, part threat.
That connection starts with Dalí and Schiaparelli. They met in Paris in the early 1930s, shared a love of technical artistry and shock value, and spent the rest of the decade making clothes that felt like dreams you couldn’t quite explain. The Skeleton Dress (1938) used trapunto quilting to make bones protrude from the outside of the body. Dalí’s note to Elsa: “I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously.” The Lobster Dress — Dalí painted the lobster directly on silk organza — was worn by Wallis Simpson for Vogue. These weren’t art printed on clothes. They were Surrealist logic applied directly to the body.
Dalí’s note to Elsa Schiaparelli: “I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously.”
Daniel Roseberry has turned Schiaparelli's house into the most visible Surrealist fashion project working today. His Spring 2026 Couture closing look: Awar in a sharp-shouldered "Elsa" jacket whose collar turns into a wing — thousands of hand-painted sfumato feathers, four hand-sculpted 3D bird beaks in browns and mauves, defying gravity at the hip. Schiaparelli has owned the red carpet for the past few years, and expect more on Monday.
And if you want the purest example of Surrealist logic in fashion: Hussein Chalayan's coffee table dress (AW 2000). A functional wooden coffee table that unfolded into a hooped skirt. Chairs that folded into suitcases. An airplane dress that bloomed open via remote control. Everyday objects becoming clothes, the body becoming furniture becoming the body again. Dalí would have wept.
The Body as the Subject
The real risk Monday night won’t be who wears the biggest dress. It’ll be who lets the body itself complicate the fantasy.
The exhibition organizes garments around body types: the “Pregnant Body,” the “Aging Body,” the “Mortal Body.” Fashion is catching up. Matthieu Blazy just sent a pregnant model down the runway at Chanel’s resort show. Rihanna’s Loewe Super Bowl look, eight months pregnant in a leather bustier, was the most visible version of this shift. Paloma Elsesser, on this year’s hosting committee, has been one of the most consistent forces for body diversity on runways and covers.
“I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naive. I want women to look stronger. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress”. - Alexander McQueen
Nobody understood the body as the subject of fashion and art better than Alexander McQueen. Honestly, when I was pulling this together, McQueen could have gone in every section. But the body was the work: the spine corsets, the jaw prosthetics, the shows where models walked through rain or on water. The body was never just wearing the clothes. It was negotiating with them. Sometimes that was romantic. Sometimes it was dark, obsessive, protective, or frightening. But it was never passive.
I love this quote from him, “I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naive. I want women to look stronger. I don’t like women to be taken advantage of. I don’t like men whistling at women in the street. I think they deserve more respect. I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress”.
Headpieces and Adornment
The Met Gala never shies away from a lot of extra moments - long trains, elaborate headpieces, and over the top accessories. Headpieces have already been having a moment in the fashion the past few years, and this year I expect to see many versions of hats, veils, crowns, sculptural earrings, and pieces that make the body feel composed from the neck up.
Sarah Burton’s Givenchy debut this season featured Stephen Jones headdresses, satin T-shirts twisted into head-wraps evoking Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Leandra flagged them in her Paris recap and she’s right: dramatic but surprisingly wearable. Louis Vuitton and Miu Miu both closed the season with hat moments too.
The historical lineage is rich. Peggy Guggenheim wore one Calder earring and one Yves Tanguy earring to the 1942 opening of Art of This Century. One artist per ear. A tiny, perfect act of wearable curating. Eileen Agar flipped a fruit basket upside down and declared it Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse (1936). Grace Jones and Philip Treacy turned hats into architecture. Frida Kahlo’s flower crowns were cultural armor, a Tehuana identity statement and a way to conceal the effects of her spinal injuries beneath beauty.
If anything from Monday actually trickles into how people dress, I think it may be this.
“Fashion should be recognized when you see how it touches people and moves people. I mean what more can you ask for from art?” - Anna Wintour
The best looks Monday night won’t paste a painting onto a dress. They’ll understand fashion as something living: made by hand, worn on a body, shaped by history, and completed in public.
As Anna Wintour has said in the past “Fashion should be recognized when you see how it touches people and moves people. I mean what more can you ask for from art?”
Tell me who understood the assignment, and who just wore the museum gift shop.
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