New Exhibit Examines Enduring Styles Since The Met Was Founded
The subjectivity of time is explored in the Costume Institute’s show “About Time: Fashion and Duration.”
“About Time: Fashion and Duration” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute seems somehow fated.
Tuesday’s official opening was bumped from early May, due to the museum’s months-long closure due to the coronavirus. First and foremost,
“About Time” is a celebration of The Met’s 150th anniversary, and the endurance of fashion. But the coronavirus has given the theme greater relevance and resonance, as much of the world has grown to look at the passage, or shiftlessness, of time so differently as they slog or stride through the pandemic.
During a preview Saturday afternoon, Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu curator in charge at the Costume Institute, said museum-goers may now be more inclined to look at the show and see what has endured and how that has happened, whether that be in regards to a sleeve, the chemise or the bustle. “The time of the mind is very different from the time of the clock. That is what I thought a lot about, especially in lockdown,” Bolton said.
One of the starting points for the show was the fact that world standardized time was created in the same decade that The Met was founded.
The show’s layout is structured around the sparring concepts of temporality by Henri Bergson and Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term “modernity” and considered fashion to be the hallmark of it, Bolton said. Bergson introduced the concept of pure duration in 1889, believing the past and present coexist in a continuous flow. Baudelaire’s view was the past and present are divisible, with the present succeeding the past.
Set up to reflect 60 minutes of fashion, there are 60 groupings of two ensembles each. Baudelaire’s temporality is presented as a linear, chronological timeline of those fashions from 1870 to the present day, drenched in black to accentuate their silhouettes and the timelessness of fashion progression. Bergson’s temporality consists of 60 interruptions or disruptions that predate or post-date those in the Baudelaire timeline, but often reflect shapes, materials, techniques and decorations that illustrate Bergson’s notion of endurance. Each “minute” has one ensemble reflecting the Baudelaire timeline and a second disruptor ensemble representative of the Bergson one. Black index notches on the bottom edges relate to the Baudelaire timeline and those on the top edge show the Bergson one. What time is it?
The first gallery is dark and somber with the pendulum of an Es Devlindesigned clock suspended and swinging from the ceiling. The white-walled second gallery is covered with mirrors that create a kaleidoscopic look of enduring designer fashion or perhaps a reflection of fast fashion.
Acknowledging how the pandemic has heightened the “About Time” theme, Bolton said the fashion industry has always been driven by time and the exhibit is a way of slowing things down. “Fashion is reflecting this accelerated pace of time with technology and everything being so digitally connected 24/7. But fashion has reflected this need for immediacy and instantaneousness [for a while]. The production of fashion has had to speed up, the circulation of fashion has turned up and the consumption has sped up — so some of this is about slowing down,” Bolton said.
With that, he exited the multimirrored second gallery and its innumerable reflections of the garments on display and turned a corner to the finale look — a white Viktor & Rolf made from swatches collected over the years. The design is a nod to sustainability, noting how their couture collections for the past four years have been comprised of surplus fabrics. “I love the simplicity of it. The silhouette suggests a pre-modern year. But apart from that, the act of quilt making and patchwork is about shared labor, community and collaboration. It’s an example of conscious creativity and the need to slow things down,” Bolton said.
An American mourning dress from
1870 — the first item visitors will see in the show —might do the trick. The choice appears to be a double entendre, given the current tumult worldwide. The elaborate dress is displayed in profile to show its raised-waist, floor-length skirt and bustle. It is exhibited with a 1939 Elsa Schiaparelli black felt evening dress, her then-updated take on the bustle. One of Bolton’s favorite pairings is an American afternoon dress from 1876 paired with Alexander McQueen’s bumster skirt that gives a new twist on the process line. Charles Frederick Worth first designed it for Princess Alexandra of Denmark.
Cristóbal Balenciaga, Jonathan Anderson, Iris van Herpen, Rudi Gernreich, Boué Soeurs, Norman Norrell, Malcolm McLaren, Jun Takahashi, Rei Kawakubo, Marc Jacobs, Gianni Versace, Issey Miyake, Charles James, Georgina Godley, Gabrielle Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld, Thom Browne, Kei Ninomiya and Olivier Rousteing are among the designers featured in the show. While some may see a what’s-old-is-new undercurrent or direct design inspiration, Bolton said the show is more about endurance and portraying connections over time such as how the bow motif has endured. Ditto for deconstruction, which the Punk movement created in the Seventies. “It’s about the recirculation of ideas, and the reappropriation of ideas. That’s what the tensions are trying to tease out with the timeline,” he said.
Walking through the exhibit, “what needs to be reflected on is fashion’s dominant ideologies like change, power, class, whiteness. They all need to be addressed, and this is a time when we can do that and have mad ideas,“Bolton said. “Why doesn’t fashion week happen in one city every year like the Olympic Games? It could be Johannesburg one year that celebrates fashion, rejuvenates a city and decentralizes fashion, and decolonizes fashion obviously. It’s a time to think radically and thoughtfully. What you don’t want to do is think rashly and think quickly. You don’t want to replace one bias with another bias. It’s time for radical change but thoughtful change.”
Referring to the choice of black as the exhibit’s predominant color, he said, “The color black has so many connotations of authority and power, but also chicness and elegance. It’s a meditation on the color black, and also on fashion and temporality.” It’s also appropriate. “Can you imagine if we did ‘Camp’ this year? It would have been a disaster,” Bolton said with a laugh, referring to last year’s Costume Institute exhibit. “This show has a quietness, a reflective and contemplative quality that the show certainly helps with.”
After Black Lives Matter gained momentum, Bolton reconsidered the curation and added more styles from
Black designers. The initial plan had been to select iconic pieces or the most quintessential silhouette of a specific period on a timeline. “I wasn’t thinking about race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. I was really looking at it purely aesthetically. Black Lives Matter made me realize it can’t not be. When you work on any show going forward, it has to be part of your intellectual framework. It has benefited the show tremendously,” Bolton said.
He was “thrilled” to add an ensemble from Hood By Air’s Shayne Oliver. “Shayne’s tricky to get a hold of because he’s such an independent thinker. He has so many interests. We’ve tried to work with Shayne in the past and his interests have been elsewhere. It’s been lovely to work with him,” Bolton said.
A Stephen Burrows black dress with ►