A Fashion Lover's Art Guide to September in New York

Between the runway shows this September, there's a version of the city's art calendar that's just as dressed up. Five exhibitions worth the detour, from costumes to textiles, here's what you need to know.

Photo by Szilveszter Makó

Bauhaus Ballet by Szilveszter Makó

Presented by Capital One with The Cultivist | 29 W 23rd St | 8-12 September

Celebrate Fashion's Big Week in NYC at Bauhaus Ballet by Szilveszter Makó with Capital One and The Cultivist . This interactive and immersive exhibition exploring identity, perspective, photography, and imagination allows visitors to step inside Szilveszter Makó’s work and experience the ideas, memories, and references that shape his practice.

Unfolding across six rooms, guests will be led through a journey of childhood memories, Hungarian folklore, art & fashion history, and the visual worlds that have served as the inspiration to Szilveszter Makó’s work. Every object in Bauhaus Ballet is a character that holds a history: bare brick walls, inherited cutlery and familiar household objects are hand plucked from a world where little was wasted and everything carried a previous life.

Bauhaus Ballet by Szilveszter Makó will be open to the public from 10-12 September, and Capital One Cardholders can get access to a Preview Dinner on 8 Sept and a DJ Set with Tove Lo on 10 Sept. Click here to learn more!

Installation view, "Costume Art" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Courtesy of the Met

Costume Art

The Met | Through 10 January, 2027

This is the first show inside the Met's new Condé M. Nast Galleries, and it's a big claim: that clothing and art were never really separate to begin with. Curator Andrew Bolton pairs roughly 200 pieces from the Costume Institute with objects pulled from across the museum's collection, organized around ideas like the aging body, the anatomical body, the mortal body. It's less a fashion history and more an argument about what dress has always been doing next to sculpture and painting. Given the run continues through January, there's no rush, but the crowds will be heaviest this week.

Iris van Herpen. Morphogenesis Dress, from the Sensory Seas collection, 2020. Laser-cut and screenprinted mesh, duchesse satin, and laser-cut Plexiglas. Collaborator: Philip Beesley. Model: Yue Han. (Photo: David Ụzọchukwu)

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

Brooklyn Museum | Through 6 December, 2026

Van Herpen's first major New York exhibition puts more than 140 of her couture pieces next to fossils, scientific specimens, and archival material from her studio. The show is organized by theme rather than chronology: water, skeletal structure, motion, sound and light. It reads as academic on paper and as pure spectacle in person, which is the point. This is the North American debut of a show that has already traveled through Paris, Australia, Singapore, and Rotterdam.

Image — Early Mechanical Shox Prototype, 1981. © Nike, Inc.

Nike: Form Follows Motion

Museum of Arts and Design | 12 September - 7 March, 2027

This is the first comprehensive museum show ever built around the global athletic brand Nike. The exhibition draws from the brand's own archive, more than 200,000 objects never shown publicly before, tracing five decades from Bill Bowerman's kitchen waffle iron to the Vaporfly. Expect the Air Force 1, the Air Jordan, and early Flyknit prototypes alongside the design research behind them. It's a reminder that sneaker culture and design history have always been part of the same conversation.

Textile works featured in "Nordic Textile Takeover: The Cold Stitch" Courtesy of Scandinavia House

The Cold Stitch

Scandinavia House | 4-16 September

This one is easy to miss, which is exactly why it belongs on the list. Part of New York Textile Month, the show brings together Scandinavian artists working in stitch and thread as a record of memory, protection, and care. There are no mannequins and no red carpet energy, just close, patient craft. If the other four shows on this list are about spectacle, this is the quiet counterpoint.