The Minneapolis Institute of Art opened "Paris Couture" on October 4, 2026, a sweeping survey of high fashion drawn from the holdings of the Palais Galliera, Paris's museum of fashion. More than 80 garments, ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present day, fill the museum's Target Galleries through January 17, 2027. Local coverage has called it the museum's most ambitious fashion exhibition in a decade. The checklist reads like a shortlist of the houses that defined the craft: Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli and Madame Grès are all represented, alongside the anonymous rigor of the ateliers themselves. The exhibition treats couture as a serious art form rather than an accessory to art history, arguing that the dialogue between garments, painting, sculpture and film has been constant since haute couture began. The galleries have been dressed for slow looking, with an emphasis on construction and handwork that invites visitors to get close to seams, embroidery and silhouettes. Curatorially the show picks up where earlier Mia fashion blockbusters left off. It follows presentations such as "Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945" and "Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan," but its loan source, one of Europe's great costume collections, makes it the museum's biggest bet on fashion in years. The loan of over 80 pieces from the Palais Galliera is itself the headline: few American museums have borrowed at this scale from the Paris collection. Admission to "Paris Couture" is ticketed at $20 for the general public, with free entry for members at the contributor level and above, and for visitors 17 and under. Public tours of the exhibition run alongside the museum's regular programming, offering closer reads of how ateliers turned dressmaking into a fine art.