Fashion Museum NYC

A museum is a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic or cultural interest are stored and exhibited, and a fashion museum displays fashion-relevant objects. When someone asks about the fashion museum of New York City, they usually mean The Museum at FIT — but New York holds several museums that exhibit fashion, each in its own way.

The Costume Institute and the Anna Wintour Costume Center

The Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute is the city's other great fashion collection. It began as the Museum of Costume Art, an independent entity formed in 1937 and led by Neighborhood Playhouse founder Irene Lewisohn. In 1946, with the financial support of the fashion industry, the Museum of Costume Art merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art as The Costume Institute, and in 1959 it became a curatorial department of the Met — the home now known as the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

Alongside the two specialists, general museums mount major fashion exhibitions. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collects, preserves and interprets modern and contemporary art and has hosted fashion subjects within that programme, the Cooper Hewitt covers design, and the Museum of the City of New York interprets the city's own character — a story in which fashion, made and worn in New York for two centuries, naturally features. Brooklyn, one of the city's five boroughs, adds the Brooklyn Museum, where the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition photographs linked from this page were taken.

Planning a Fashion Museum Visit

The practical choice depends on the exhibition, not the institution's name. The Museum at FIT mounts fashion exhibitions as its core purpose and is covered in its own summary in this section. The Costume Institute's exhibitions are seasonal and enormously popular. Other museums feature fashion occasionally, so checking current programmes — through the fashion museums guide and the fashion exhibits NYC summary, both linked from this page — is the way to build a visit around what is actually on.

New York rewards combining them: a specialist exhibition at FIT, the Costume Institute when its show is running, and a design or city museum for context cover the full range of how fashion is exhibited — as craft, as art and as social history — within a single trip.

Fashion in the City's Museums

New York's museum fashion works because the city supplies both halves of the subject: the garments and the industry that made them. Collections here were built beside a working garment trade, and curators can borrow expertise — pattern makers, sample machinists, retired showroom staff — that exists in few other museum cities. For students, that makes a New York exhibition a practical education as well as a spectacle: construction can be studied in the gallery in the morning and its modern equivalent watched in the district in the afternoon. No other museum city joins the two halves of the visit quite so closely.