Objects by Country

The map shows how many items are associated with a country based on the Culture field. Hovering over each bubble shows the country name and the number of objects.

This bubble map gives a quick sense of how the Met Costume Institute’s collection is distributed across the world. Each red circle marks a country, and its size shows how many objects in our dataset are associated with that place (based on the Culture field). The overall picture suggests that the collection is geographically broad—objects appear on every inhabited continent—but it is also clearly uneven. The largest bubbles cluster in the United States and Western Europe, indicating that those regions dominate the museum’s holdings, while many countries in Africa, South America, and parts of Asia appear with much smaller counts. Since the Met is a U.S. institution, some overrepresentation of the Western world is expected, but the map raises a larger question about how a “global” fashion collection is built and whose cultural production ends up most visible. Finally, because culture-to-country links require interpretation, this slide also highlights a limitation: some associations were inferred or manually matched, so the map reflects both the museum’s cataloging practices and our mapping choices, not just a neutral geographic “truth.”