Met Museum show at new Costume Institute puts fashion in same spotlight as Egyptian artefacts

Art pieces depicting the naked and clothed body are paired with clothed mannequins. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

A section on the Corpulent Body features ensembles by Michaela Stark, the Australian designer whose corsets and bound garments deliberately accentuate bulges of fat and flesh, paired with a Cycladic marble female figure from 4500-4000 BCE. Another of Stark’s works is paired with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana and Serpent sculpture.

Representations of the Disabled Body include a mannequin styled after the campaigner Sinéad Burke, wearing a Burberry trenchcoat modified to fit her small stature by the photographer Tim Walker, including a crown made from the excess fabric chopped off the sleeve.

All of the mannequins in this section of the show, designed to foreground diversity, are arranged on high podiums or, as Bolton put it, deliberately “pedestalised”. Seeing a true diversity of bodies in a fashion museum setting feels far more refreshing than it should – and so much more interesting.

Irises by Vincent van Gogh and Yves Saint Laurent. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Though the exhibition features many straightforwardly beautiful works of art – an Yves Saint Laurent 1988 silk organza jacket decorated with a design of Van Gogh’s Irises paired with the 1889 painting, for example – the overall emphasis of the show is of strangeness and surprise.

Dresses with embroidered anatomical body parts and sculptures and garments resembling skeletons featured heavily in a section on the Mortal Body; in a section on the Aging Body a Batsheva jumper emblazoned with the word Hag beside The Old Duchess, a 1905 painting by George Luks; a Vetements hoodie declaring “I’m retired” next to a Diane Arbus photograph of retirees; a Sarah Lucas sculpture next to a piece of wearable art made of what Bolton described as “Nora Batty-like stockings” by the British designer Harry Pontefract.

The show’s press preview is also the precursor to Monday’s Met Gala. Sánchez Bezos was there, wearing a shimmering bronze dress. In remarks that will not appeal to the protesters papering the city with posters urging for a boycott of the event, Wintour underlined the necessity of funding for art for a successful city, and described Sánchez Bezos as a “force for joy, a force for generosity”. The Met Gala, she said, has a ripple effect across New York, driving trade to many local businesses, including “God knows how many hairdressers”.