Andrew Bolton (curator)


Andrew Bolton is a British museum curator and current Head Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City.
Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, UK, Bolton graduated from the University of East Anglia with a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Non-Western Art. In 2017, he was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art.

Career

Bolton came to the Met from London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 2002. In 2002, he joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as an Associate Curator of the Costume Institute. On 8 September 2015 it was announced that he would replace the retiring Harold Koda as Curator in Chief of the Costume Institute. In 2015, he was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Fashion. Bolton has created and or co-created several critically lauded exhibitions including Savage Beauty featuring clothing created by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, as well as . Bolton exhibitions are known for their, "scholarly rigor....whimsy.... theatricality."
Rei Kawakubo was the subject of Bolton's May 2017 exhibition for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's costume institute. Vogue magazine and the Metropolitan Museum in New York announced that the exhibition dedicated to Kawakubo was scheduled for its 2017 season between 4 May 2017 and 4 September 2017. In an interview with Vogue in April 2017, Bolton stated: “I really think her influence is so huge, but sometimes it’s subtle. It’s not about copying her; it’s the purity of her vision... Rei was really involved in the design of the exhibit”. Bolton also stated that the exhibit would be an austere, all-white maze hosting approximately 150 Comme ensembles. Both the exhibit and accompanying book by Bolton are based upon the recurrent fashion dichotomies concentrating on eight thematic oppositions listed as: fashion/antifashion; design/not design; model/multiple; then/now; high/low; self/other; object/subject; and clothes/not clothes.
Bolton's show, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, opened on 10 May 2018. Bolton described the exhibition as an examination of "the role dress plays within the Roman Catholic Church and the role the Roman Catholic Church plays within the fashionable imagination." The exhibition features objects from the Vatican Collection alongside designs by Gianni Versace, John Galliano for Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and other designers.
Bolton is featured alongside Anna Wintour in Andrew Rossi's 2016 documentary film "The First Monday in May" which is the staging of the Metropolitan Museum's annual Costume Institute Gala.

Personal life

Bolton lives in Manhattan with his partner of five years, fashion designer Thom Browne.

Literary works

The following is an incomplete list of his literary works: