Venus Williams Leads the Conversation on Fashion as Art at the Met Gala 2026 Press Preview

Reported by Vogue.

Venus Williams was 14 when her mother stitched her first tennis skirt by hand. That memory — watching fabric become something wearable, something hers — planted a conviction she carried straight to the Met Gala press conference this week, where she spoke as co-chair of the 2026 exhibition, "Costume Art." "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," she said. According to Vogue, the exhibition explores fashion's long relationship with the human body — and what that relationship reveals about culture, identity, and power.

Williams has always understood dressing as a competitive sport in its own right. "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." But beyond the spectacle, she credits clothing with something more quietly radical: the ability to connect her to herself. That dual function — outward expression, inner excavation — is exactly what makes her the right person to anchor this conversation.

Fashion Moves Off the Basement Floor

The timing is pointed. "Costume Art" also marks the debut of the Costume Institute's new Condé M. Nast Galleries — a 12,000-square-foot permanent space relocated from a basement outpost to just off the museum's Great Hall. It's not a subtle metaphor. Met director and CEO Max Hollein called it "a significant moment for the institution's history," adding that the move makes a clear institutional statement: fashion is art. Designer heavyweights including Thom Browne, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, and Saint Laurent's Anthony Vaccarello were present to mark the occasion.

Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton — dressed, naturally, in a Thom Browne suit — framed the exhibition's thesis with precision. "The history of art has always been, in no small measure, a history of the dressed body," he said, noting that across the Met's 5,000-plus years of collection, one constant endures: the clothed human figure. His argument goes further than aesthetics. "Clothing is never neutral," Bolton said. "It mediates between the self and the world, expressing who we are, where we belong, and how we wish to be seen." The show asks visitors to treat the dressed body not as passive subject matter, but as a living medium through which art history itself can be reread.

"Costume Art" opens to the public at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 10 — and if Williams and Bolton have their way, you'll never look at a hemline the same way again.

Read the original at Vogue.