Fashion And Duration Before It Closes February 7
Dress, Viktor & Rolf, spring/summer 2020 haute couture; Courtesy Viktor + Rolf. Headpiece by Shay … [+]
About Time: Fashion And Duration, the Costume Institute’s exhibition which experienced a 5-month delay in opening due to the global health crisis, is now set to close on February 7.
The Museum requires timed tickets due to government regulations regarding capacity and social distance which can be obtained at metmuseum.org or on-site.
About Time was created to honor the 150th anniversary of The Met and as such, the show explores fashion’s history over the course of 150 years. With Virginia Woolf as what the museum describes as a “ghost narrator” throughout the show, the clothes on view were selected from the time frame that aligns with The Met’s founding, 1870 to the present.
A core tenet of the curation is based on Henri Bergson’s idea of la durée (duration) and, according to the Museum’s website, the show “Explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future.”
The exhibition consists of only black garments in order to showcase the change in fashion through silhouette rather than style. The sole non-black garment is the one pictured above, a white dress from Viktor & Rolf’s spring/summer 2020 haute couture collection. The dress, which is made from upcycled swatches of material set in a patchwork design, was chosen to close the show as a representation of the future of fashion, one where the “emphasis on community, collaboration, and sustainability,” are values that will drive the industry as it progresses into the future.
Several online viewing options were created although current online viewing tickets are sold out. Virtual group tours with a Museum guide are available until February 28 for a fee of $300 per group ($200 for university student groups) which must be paid one week in advance. Otherwise, A limited number of same-day tickets are available to reserve in person through February 7.
For more ways to experience the show virtually, Andrew Bolton leads a video tour of the exhibition here and also speaks about the exhibition’s design on a Sunday at The Met talk with Es Devlin, the exhibition’s designer.