About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition at The Met Museum

About Time: Fashion and Duration exhibition at The Met Museum

The latest exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute traces a century and a half of fashion. About Time: Fashion and Duration, will be on show until February 7th, after a five month delayed opening from May due to the coronavirus.

The Costume Institute’s 2020 exhibition traces 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 explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future. Virginia Woolf serves as the “ghost narrator” of the exhibition.

All of the garments are black to emphasize changes in silhouette, except at the conclusion of the show, where a white dress from Viktor & Rolf’s spring/summer 2020 haute couture collection, made from upcycled swatches in a patchwork design, serves as a symbol for the future of fashion with its emphasis on community, collaboration, and sustainability.