Discover the Best Books Written by Andrew Bolton

Andrew Bolton (born 1966) is a British museum curator and current head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bolton was born in 1966 in Blackburn, Lancashire, and majored in anthropology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he graduated in 1987. 

Bolton began his career at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. On September 8, 2015, it was announced that he would replace the retiring Harold Koda as a curator in-chief of the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Later that year, 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 China: Through the Looking Glass (both with Koda). Bolton exhibitions are known for their "scholarly rigor....whimsy.... (and) theatricality."

Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo was the subject of the 2017 exhibit. 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.” Bolton also stated that the exhibition 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: (1) fashion/antifashion; (2) design/not design; (3) model/multiple; (4) then/now; (5) high/low; (6) self/other; (7) object/subject; and (8) 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 included 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 documents the staging of the Metropolitan Museum's annual Costume Institute Gala.