Fashion as Art; On Dressing with Intention
This year's Met Gala, centered on the exhibition Costume Art and the dress code "Fashion is Art," returned to a conversation that has always felt personal to me. Not a new debate, but a familiar one, whether fashion belongs in the same conversation as art, or whether it exists somewhere outside of it.
I have always thought it does. Not because of red carpets or haute couture, but because of something much more ordinary, the way getting dressed has always felt, to me, like composing something. A game of colors, proportions, and details. A way of communicating something to the world about the kind of beauty I want to be part of.
Fashion, at its best, is not just something you look at. It is something you live in, move through, and use to say something about who you are. Andrew Bolton, the curator behind this year's Costume Institute exhibition, said it well: "In wearing clothes, we don't simply express who we are. We become who we are."
That has always felt true to me. When I put together an outfit I love, there is a particular kind of excitement to it, the same feeling I get when I find the right words for a piece of writing, or when a room comes together in a way that feels exactly right. It is not about following what is trending. It is about finding something that feels like a small act of composition, intentional, considered, and genuinely mine.
I have always noticed that a love for fashion tends to travel with a love for art and interiors. The same instincts are at work, color, proportion, texture, the way things relate to each other. A wardrobe and a room are not so different. Both are spaces where you decide what belongs and what doesn't, and both say something about who you are.
Fashion as art is not only what happens on a runway or at the Met. It happens every morning, in the quiet decisions we make about how we want to show up in the world.