The Timeline of Fashion

The theme for the 2020 Met Gala has been announced As the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates its 150th anniversary, it will hold a series of exhibitions which will put the spotlight on masterworks in its collections, as well as new acquisitions made as part of the 2020 Collections Initiative. In keeping with the year’s theme, the Met announced that the Costume Institute’s spring exhibitions will showcase a century-and-a-half of fashion history pulled from its archives and presented along a “disruptive” timeline. The theme for the “fashion’s biggest night out,” as Vogue calls it, is “About Time: Fashion and Duration”.

Andrew Bolton, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, found inspiration for the Met Gala 2020 theme and exhibition in the 1992 Sally Potter film “Orlando,” which was based in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. “There’s a wonderful scene,” Bolton says, as quoted in Vogue, “in which Tilda Swinton enters the maze in an 18th-century woman’s robe à la Francaise and as she runs through it, her clothes change to mid-19th-century dress, and she re-emerges in 1950s England. That’s where the original idea came from.”

Bolton further says that About Time: Fashion and Duration will take a “nuanced and open-ended” approach. “It’s a reimagining of fashion history that’s fragmented, discontinuous and heterogeneous”. The co-chairs for the Gala, which will be held on Monday, May 4, will be fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière, actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, Meryl Streep, Emma Stone and editor-in-chief of

Vogue Anna Wintour.