the met shares video preview of postponed 'about time: fashion and duration' exhibition

on the first monday in may, the costume institute at new york’s metropolitan museum of art typically celebrates the opening of its spring exhibition with its famous gala. however, this year, with the museum still closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the institution has instead shared a video preview of ‘about time: fashion and duration’, which is now set to open on october 29, 2020. see the garments in more detail in our follow up article here.

the exhibition will trace a century and a half of fashion — from 1870 to the present — along a disruptive timeline, on the occasion of the met’s 150th anniversary. employing henri bergson’s concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future. virginia woolf will serve as the ‘ghost narrator’ of the exhibition.

a timeline of 120 fashions will unfold in two adjacent galleries fabricated as enormous clock faces and organized around the principle of sixty minutes of fashion. each ‘minute’ will feature a pair of garments—the primary work representing the linear nature of fashion and the secondary work its cyclical character. each pair will be connected through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration. for example, a black silk faille princess-line dress from the late 1870s will be paired with an alexander mcqueen ‘bumster’ skirt from 1995.

all of the primary garments will be black, to emphasize their evolving silhouettes, and the secondary will be either black or white, to underscore their mutually reinforcing associations. the exhibition will conclude with a small selection of garments from 2020 that link the concept of duration to debates about diversity, inclusivity, sustainability, traceability, transparency, longevity, collaboration, and other ethical issues germane to the next decade of fashion. the exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

exhibition info:

name: about time: fashion and duration
location: the metropolitan museum of art, fifth avenue, new york
dates: october 29, 2020 – february 7, 2021