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Metropolitan Museum of Art

THE MET

Costume Art

Fukuko Ando’s works of art are exhibited at Costume Art. Two dresses are donated to the museum and become part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s collection.

Blood

Wing Y

Costum Art


The Costume Institute’s spring 2026 exhibition explores depictions of the dressed body across The Met’s vast collection, pairing garments with artworks to reveal the inherent relationship between clothing and the body.

Focusing primarily on Western art from prehistory to the present, Costume Art presents connections between garments from The Costume Institute and objects from the Museum’s other collecting areas. Pairings between fashions and artworks will present a spectrum of connections and experiences: from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, the illustrative to the symbolic, and the playful to the profound. These pairings are organized into a series of thematic body types that reflect their pervasiveness and endurance through time and cultures.

Costume Art is the inaugural exhibition in the new, nearly 12,000-square-foot galleries adjacent to the Great Hall. This space will display The Costume Institute’s annual spring show and, at times, shows from the Museum’s other curatorial departments, including those that explore the intersection of fashion and art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art 
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New York, NY 1002

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Mandala Lotus

I am working on a new series of dresses inspired by the Mandala Lotus flower

“Blessings of the Lotus Flower“

When I was little, I read the story of Chūjō-hime (747–775). And I was very impressed.I always remembered that I longed for the process that the lotus thread was pulled out, and when it touched flowers of various colors, the thread was dyed like a dream and the mandala was completed.( Fukuko Ando )

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Creation Process

May all people in the world be content. May they see the lotus spark in all others, and may the light of love shine in our hearts. May all live in harmony.

Fukuko Ando

The Dress as a Sculpture

In my work, a piece of fabric is transformed into a dress through an intense and unbroken engagement with each wave of change in the fabric’s own swell and movement.

The starting point is a flat piece of fabric. Sewing a raised broderie into this flat surface introduces a new three-dimensional note, creating waves of movement and new shapes and swell as the fabric responds. 

I make a single cut into the new swell in the fabric. The fabric responds again and

I follow the fabric’s waves of movement intuitively. From action to response, the story of this dress is being written, moment to moment, as each change and response happens. 

My hands have to see and grasp the story that the fabric is telling. The fabric takes on a life of its own, with new mandalas flowering in it, one after another.

More complex shapes are created by cross cuts, twists in the fabric, new broderies.

After a long time, my hands become still. The dress is complete: a piece of fabric has become a living mandala.

I work so that different dimensions can flower one by one on the same piece of fabric, just as the petals of a lotus flower open one after another.

Like the cell and the body, we can zoom in to see the micro-mandalas sewn into the detail of the dress, and we can stand back to see the macro-mandala of the whole dress.

Fukuko Ando


A piece of fabric becomes a lotus mandala dress.

The fabric is like the soil in which to sow the seeds of the mandala.

The needle becomes the mandala seed.

Each stitch draws a new world.

Cutting the fabric brings forth a new dimensional space.

New petals open in a new space. A new life opens skyward.

The opening of a new life expresses the mandala consciousness. 

The fabric is imbued with consciousness.