‘Real bodies’: Met Gala’s body-positive fashion exhibition celebrates all shapes and sizes

On a summer day in New York’s Brooklyn borough last year, artist and couture designer Michaela Stark found herself in a studio surrounded by 175 cameras for a photo shoot unlike any she had done before.

Clad only in her signature corsetry that binds the flesh, Stark stood in the middle as the cameras captured all angles of her body, simultaneously – part of a process known as photogrammetry. The goal was to scan her body and build a mannequin – three, actually – for display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And at the Met Gala, no less.

“It was definitely a bit nerve-wracking,” Stark says of the “intimate and vulnerable” experience. But, “something about being naked on a 40-degree [Celsius] day in a corset that isn’t hiding anything kind of takes the awkwardness away from the situation, actually.”

The mannequins, and others based on real-life models like Stark, will feature in “Costume Art”, the coming spring exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute that will be launched by the starry May 4 gala. It is part of an effort to add an element of body positivity to a show that examines the dressed body in art over the centuries, curator Andrew Bolton says.

Bolton explains that the classic fashion mannequin is usually around a women’s size two. The idea of these new mannequins, which will accompany the more traditional ones, is to stress that in the history of art, certain body types have been ignored or excluded – the corpulent body, the disabled body or the ageing body, for example. But they, too, are part of the story.

The aim was “to challenge a history of museum mannequin display that’s very much characterised by thin, abled and standardised bodies”, Bolton says. Rather than simply adapt existing mannequins, curators wanted to base the new mannequins “on a diverse range of real bodies with real, lived experiences”.