Extraordinarily Ordinary

What the Met's 2027 fashion exhibition reveals about the uneasy relationship between art and commerce

I give out a lot of passes to organizations in the cultural arena. Whether a commercial enterprise or a non-profit, it's a tough business. The market is extremely competitive, and the top players take almost all of the rewards, while the overwhelming majority of participants are undercompensated and underfunded. You want to be in the first group. It's not even about the accumulation of wealth, but rather that being there means you can afford to focus on your cultural and creative work and build it with better materials, helpers, and distribution opportunities.

So when pivots and compromises are made for the sake of revenue, my artist heart might not always be thrilled, but in my MBA-trained head, I can understand and can even find a way to be grateful that people are willing to shoulder the responsibility of making difficult decisions so that we can continue to have things like fashion magazines and art museums.

Few people have shouldered that responsibility as successfully as Anna Wintour.

Since ascending to the throne of Editor in Chief in 1988, Wintour has transformed American Vogue into something far larger than a fashion magazine. She understood, perhaps earlier and better than anyone else in the industry, that fashion could become a central part of mainstream popular culture, and that the celebrities who captured the public's imagination could bring enormous audiences to a world that had historically been the province of a relatively small and exclusive establishment.

The result has been a publication in which celebrity culture increasingly takes precedence over fashion itself. While its sister publications around the world still devote considerable attention to capital-F Fashion, complete with runway coverage, avant-garde editorials, and articles on innovations in the industry, American Vogue gives us Hollywood stars, celebrity models, and influencers from reality TV and TikTok alike.

It's difficult to argue with the commercial logic — and Vogue is, after all, a business that covers other businesses. People can love to look at Vogue and the clothes on display inside, but if they don't buy, the industry isn't sustainable. Both sides have to play together.

Wintour's American Vogue lent credibility to celebrity culture, and in turn, celebrity culture helped fill the coffers of American Vogue. Focusing on the celebrities mainstream America cared about meant an expanded audience for the publication, which also meant an expanded audience for everything else in the magazine: actual fashion, as well as a broad scope of cultural subjects presented with intelligence, wit, and beauty.

And a financially secure Vogue meant a powerful platform for showcasing and uplifting American designers, something the Old World fashion establishment has not always been particularly enthusiastic about. Wintour has been instrumental in creating the cultural environment in which fashion has become an enormous global business, and in which American designers and luxury brands have been able to command an unprecedented share of the world's attention.

These brands employ enormous numbers of creative professionals and provide opportunities for artists outside the fashion world: Louis Vuitton's collaborations with Yayoi Kusama, Miu Miu's literary and film initiatives, Chanel's partnership with Zaha Hadid, Hermès's commissioned illustrations, and countless others. Few industries do as much to bring art into our everyday lives, and fashion accomplishes this remarkable feat by making cultural participation something people willingly pay for. We happily part with our money for the chance to own what these brands are selling and participate in modern culture through the things we buy.

That is no small achievement, nor is Wintour's ability to court the world's wealthiest people and persuade them to direct some of their fortunes toward fashion and the arts. Cultural institutions need patrons, and patrons have always wanted something in return, whether prestige, access, influence, or simply the satisfaction of associating themselves with great achievements.

In theory, it's a small price to pay to sustain a massive industry of creative talent — but only if that creative talent is given the latitude to innovate and create, not just sell.

Of course there has to be a balance between art and commerce. But what happens when the compromises that make artistic ambition possible begin to determine the ambitions themselves? When does the pursuit of a larger audience cease to support the art and begin to diminish it?

And at what point does an institution become so successful at surviving that it begins to lose sight of what it was supposed to preserve?

Consider the Met Costume Institute.

The Costume Institute has given us truly eye-opening and awe-inspiring exhibitions on camp, Black dandyism, the relationship between fashion and the Catholic Church, and the relationship between fashion and technology. These exhibitions have challenged our understanding of fashion, placing it in conversation with art, history, religion, politics, and society.

They have also helped elevate the decorative arts more broadly worldwide. The Costume Institute has been one of the most visible forces in a broader movement to challenge the traditional hierarchy between the fine and decorative arts. We now see fashion exhibitions in art museums from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, from Richmond to Miami, from Dallas to San Francisco. And the decorative arts have begun to rise in respect in the art world, with Art Basel showing wall tapestries and silk screens, and great collectors starting to treat jewelry as something more than just a sparkly little trinket.

To some extent, this has been the rising tide that has raised all ships, and Anna Wintour deserves considerable credit for helping to make it possible.

Since taking over as chair of the Met Gala in 1995, she has transformed it into one of the most lucrative and culturally influential events in the world. Just as she did with Vogue, she accomplished this by inviting an ever-expanding cast of celebrities and wealthy patrons into fashion's inner sanctum. The Gala has become a spectacle in its own right, with celebrities appearing in extraordinary creations that bring fashion's most ambitious designers and craftspeople to the attention of audiences around the world.

The event's cultural prominence has translated into substantial financial support for the Costume Institute, helping make possible the acquisitions, preservation, research, and exhibitions that have contributed so much to fashion's standing within the art world.

In recent years, the Gala's patrons have increasingly come from the technology industry. Amazon, Apple, TikTok, and Instagram have all sponsored the event, while Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary co-chairs and lead sponsors in 2026.

It's difficult to begrudge Wintour her success in persuading people with extraordinary fortunes to support an institution whose work might otherwise struggle to attract their attention. Without that financial support, the Costume Institute would have fewer resources to pursue its mission.

But the money is not without its complications.

On November 5, 2026, the Costume Institute announced its 2027 exhibition: extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday. As stated on the Met's own site, the exhibition will explore “how designers transform familiar garments, materials, and objects,” focusing on a range of everyday things “from jeans, T-shirts, and puffer coats to paper, plastic, and metal.”

I can't decide if that sounds more like an episode of Project Runway or RuPaul's Drag Race.

There is a place for this exhibition, but is that place the Met — the very same institution that houses Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, Monet's Water Lilies, Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware, David's The Death of Socrates, Caravaggio's The Musicians, and the Temple of Dendur?

Of course extraordinary things can be made from ordinary materials. That's hardly a revelation. Indeed, the transformation of ordinary materials into extraordinary works of art is among the most impressive things an artist can accomplish. The exhibition may well reveal astonishing feats of craftsmanship and imagination, and I certainly hope it does.

But the premise itself feels curiously modest for an institution that has spent decades expanding our understanding of what fashion can mean. After exhibitions exploring fashion's relationships with religion, technology, race, and identity, an examination of the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary clothes feels like a retreat to safer territory.

The Costume Institute has the resources, the collections, and the cultural authority to introduce us to extraordinary achievements in fashion that we might otherwise never encounter. Why, then, should its most important exhibition of the year be organized around the things we already wear to the grocery store?

It’s also worth noting the event’s sponsors. The exhibition's principal sponsor is Instagram, and a major additional sponsor is Moncler, the luxury brand best known for its puffer jackets, an item notably included in the list of garments to be explored.

That doesn't mean the sponsors dictated the exhibition's subject — there is no reason to assume that Andrew Bolton and his curatorial team have surrendered their artistic independence — but it does raise a question about what happens when the interests of cultural institutions, their patrons, and the commercial brands they represent begin to converge so neatly that it's increasingly difficult to distinguish one from another.

We've seen something similar in entertainment. The Barbie movie was a cultural phenomenon, a commercially successful film, and an enormous advertisement for Mattel, all at once. Its commercial purpose didn't prevent it from being creative or entertaining, but it did mean that the artistic work and the marketing campaign were, from the beginning, part of the same enterprise.

The Met is not Mattel. Its mission is to preserve and celebrate artistic achievement, not to promote its sponsors. But as the interests of cultural institutions and their commercial patrons become increasingly intertwined, where does one end and the other begin?

The danger isn't simply that commercial interests might influence which exhibitions get made. It's that they might begin to shape what we consider worth exhibiting.

The commercial world prizes familiarity, accessibility, and scale. Art, at its best, does precisely the opposite: challenge our expectations, expand our imaginations, and celebrate achievements that resist standardization. The value of craftsmanship lies in the accumulated knowledge, individual skill, and creative vision that cannot be replicated on an assembly line.

There is a certain irony in technology companies, whose fortunes have been built on efficiency and scale, becoming patrons of institutions devoted to celebrating the singular achievements of human imagination. Perhaps the greatest contribution these patrons could make would be to support precisely the things their businesses cannot replicate.

But after decades of exhibitions that have expanded our understanding of fashion and its place in the world, organizing the Costume Institute's premier exhibition around the familiar feels like a retreat rather than a revelation.

The Costume Institute has spent decades expanding the horizons of our imaginations. It would be a shame to see those horizons grow smaller.

I don't envy the people who have to make the decisions that keep our cultural institutions alive, nor do I underestimate what Anna Wintour has accomplished. Her ability to navigate the intersection of culture, commerce, celebrity, and wealth is extraordinary in its own right. Fashion and the arts have benefited enormously from that ability, and I suspect they will continue to do so.

But survival is not the same as success, and commercial success is not the same as cultural achievement. The purpose of bringing money into art is to make extraordinary things possible, not to make art more accommodating to the people who provide the money.

Those of us who still believe in that pursuit needn't content ourselves with complaining to one another in texts, over cocktails, and on the Internet.

If we've learned anything recently, it's that even the richest and most powerful institutions are not beyond the influence of the people whose support gives them their power. And that, at least, is reason for hope.