The Met 2020 Gala has been postponed. It should have been held on May 4 to officially open the grand spring exhibition of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York, but this year, exhibition and gala, always hand in hand, will be held later.
About Time: Fashion and Duration, the 2020 exhibition, would have seen the light from May 7 to September 7, although due to the temporary closure of the museum, the new dates are moved to the fall: from October 29, 2020 to February 7, 2021. What is still not clear is the date of the gala, although it seems that it will be in October to serve, as every year, as a prelude to the exhibition. This year, moreover, was a special year since the museum celebrates 150 years of history.
2020 Met Gala travels back in time
This year’s theme is no slouch. Time, or rather, time travel, is the Met’s choice for About Time: Fashion and Duration. The exhibition will trace a century and a half of fashion, from 1870 to the present day, and will do so through a disruptive timeline. 150 years which is also the 150-year history of the museum.
Using Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothing generates temporal associations that mix past, present and future. Virginia Woolf will be the phantom narrator of the exhibition and it is her work Orlando or, rather, the film adaptation that was made of it in 1992, served as inspiration to devise the exhibition.
The main responsible for the show, Andrew Bolton, recounted that:
There is a wonderful scene in which Swinton enters a maze in an 18th century female French-style dress and as she runs, her clothes evolve into a mid-19th century dress and she reappears in 1850s England. That’s where the idea comes from
The timeline in which the exhibition is structured will be displayed in two adjacent galleries: the two faces of a huge clock that marks the sixty minutes of fashion. In each minute you can see 2 designs, one that represents the linear nature of fashion and another its cyclical nature. Shapes, materials, patterns, techniques, prints… will connect the 120 designs of the exhibition, as well as color.
Black and white, present and past of fashion
The black and white bichrome is the keynote of the exhibition and has a purpose: to emphasize the evolution of their silhouettes and associations between garments. The black ensembles follow each other progressively and show the frenetic rhythm of fashion, its transience, its change. The white sets interrupt that timeline, they are earlier or later than their black companions, but also similar. They show a cycle. Past and present enter into conversation and offer a different look at the history of fashion.
We will be able to see comparisons of designers from different eras such as Alaïa, Vionet, Poiret or John Galliano, Gianni Versace and Tom Ford. In this regard, Bolton noted that her favorite comparison was that of a princess-line, black silk gown from the late 1870s with a skirt bumster signed Alexander McQueen in 1995. Two designs that are 125 years apart but that meet the same objective of achieving an elongated silhouette. Also couples of contemporary designers as Chanel and Patou in the 1920s or Rei Kawakubo and Georgina Godley in the 1980s of which only one would go down in history.
Present, past … and future of fashion
The exhibition ends in the present, or rather in the future, with a selection of garments that link the concept of duration with the concerns that will mark the near future of the fashion industry: the diversity, the inclusion, the sustainability, the longevity….
Time, a complex and abstract concept that allows us to reinterpret and decode the history of fashion. That was to be the theme of the Met Gala 2020, which we do not yet know when it will be held but which has served as a pretext to talk about fashion, Anna Wintour’s role at the gala, success and failure, vision and the future of the industry.
