The latest exhibit at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art explores fashion’s reputation and reinvention at is relates to time. The show had been delayed for months by the pandemic, and that time was used, in part, to tweak its presentation on account the Black Lives Matter movement.
Normally the city’s social event of the year, 2020’s Met Gala organized by Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour — which usually opens the costume exhibit — was cancelled, like every major indoor gathering since mid-March.
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Met, Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Costume Institute, aimed to highlight the museum’s own collection that includes 33,000 pieces of clothing and accessories. “When I began working on the show, it started off as this sort of meditation on fashion and temporality,” he told a press preview of the exhibit entitled “About Time,” which will run until February 7.
However, Bolton did not want to focus on chronology, instead presenting concepts in pairs — two pieces, two parallel time periods with similar aesthetics, for a 124-piece show featuring a single gown to close. “By having past and present coexist together, it sort of takes you outside of the confine of chronology and makes you think about time very differently,” Bolton said.
The concept of the exhibit creates an ongoing dialogue between older pieces from the 1870s when the Met was founded and more recent items from the 1960s and beyond. For example, elements that were popular in 1870s-era wardrobes are seen again in the work of modern designers considered particularly innovative, including Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, and John Galliano.
“Fashion is always for the movement, always about this succession of time and notions of, novelty and ephemerality and sometimes obsolescence and that’s one aspect of time,” Bolton said. “But at the same time fashion looks back on itself often.”
With shorter skirts and dresses and cuts that flow rather than restrict, modern designers give a contemporary edge to older pieces, like the iconic Chanel jacket. A mini-skirt pairing gives the piece a facelift, thanks to the innovation of Karl Lagerfeld, a master of reinterpretation. Today’s designers play with a far wider spectrum of materials than were available to their predecessors, thanks to technological progress and the evolution of use and taste.
Raf Simons embellishes a 2013 black strapless bustier dress with the satin flowers of Hubert de Givenchy in 1957 but in leather, a material only in recent decades popular with womenswear. And sometimes older styles stand the test of time: Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo for women, for example, or his belted mini-dress of 1966.
Bolton decided to modify the show in light of the enormous anti-racism protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in May. According to Bolton, the original version included “some designers of color… but not a huge amount.” He and Wintour worked together closely to make the tweaks.
Vogue’s leader has faced accusations since June from some collaborators and journalists of long favoring fashion created by and for white people, and sidelining people of color at Conde Nast. Wintour, 70, attended the press preview of the exhibit but remained silent.
“Undoubtedly, I have made mistakes along the way, and if any mistakes were made at Vogue under my watch, they are mine to own and remedy and I am committed to doing the work,” one of fashion’s most powerful figures told the Times recently.
Changes at the exhibit include a contribution from Black American pioneering designer Stephen Burrows, next to a Xuly.Bet dress from the Franco-Malian designer Lamine Kouyate.
Bolton made assurances that the initiative would not be short-lived, saying all exhibitions will now include diversity efforts.
