The Metropolitan Museum of Art does not lack for superlatives, but its Heavenly Bodies exhibition has earned a fresh set. Spanning 25 galleries and 5,500 square metres, it is the largest exhibit in the museum's history, and also its most popular ever.
Designed with a pilgrimage in mind, the show is staged across two locations roughly ten kilometres apart: the Met Fifth Avenue and the Met Cloisters, the latter perched in Fort Tryon Park above Washington Heights. Visitors are encouraged to make the journey between the two, mirroring the devotional travel the exhibition itself evokes.
Organised by the museum's Costume Institute in collaboration with the department of Medieval Art, Heavenly Bodies explores how Catholicism's imagery and symbolism have shaped contemporary haute couture and ready-to-wear design. The result places fashion in dialogue with centuries of ecclesiastical art and architecture.
The line-up reads like a roll-call of the form's defining names. Designs from Coco Chanel, Gianni Versace, Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana and Cristóbal Balenciaga appear throughout, set against an extraordinary array of ecclesiastical garments drawn from the Vatican's Sistine Chapel Sacristy.
For those able to reach New York before the doors close, the exhibition is well worth the time. Few shows manage to be at once so vast, so reverent and so unmistakably of the moment.
