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Filmed by Kathryn MacLeod
Filmed by Kathryn MacLeod
1949
Like a master sculptor of cloth, Charles James accentuated the bust in his black silk-satin Tulip dress, displayed here in the Met’s Leon Levy and Shelby White Court (though the exhibition itself will be staged in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall).
1984
In this black velvet dress (unwrapped here by Costume Institute conservator Glenn Petersen), Jean Paul Gaultier transmogrified the natural breast shape with jutting geometric cones.
1902
Elements and idioms of 18th-century menswear turn up in this gold-silk-and-metal-thread-embroidered jacket and lace jabot by Morin Blossier.
2018
Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière looked to menswear of the ancien régime with this jacquard-weave vest and blouse set.
c. 1885
A bustle achieves an improbable 90-degree angle on this walking dress embellished with braid.
1986
In Yohji Yamamoto’s deconstructivist take on Victoriana, the bustle’s understructure peeks out of the black wool coat.
1987
Christian Lacroix took the skirt in this dress to balletic proportions, adding lace and grosgrain embroidery and finishing it off with a pair of panniers.
1952
Black paillettes festoon this tulle-and-silk-faille midi-dress by Charles James. Photographed in the Met’s Conservation Lab.
Filmed by Kathryn MacLeod
c. 1895
The leg-of-mutton-sleeved shoulders match the width of the skirt’s hem on this silk dinner dress by Mrs. Arnold.
2020
Alexander McQueen’s Sarah Burton references the voluminous sleeve of the 19th century in this ivory linen dress with black topstitching detail.
TO CELEBRATE THE 150th anniversary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of its Costume Institute, set out to consider the nature of time and fashion. “I always thought that fashion is really just another name for time,” Bolton says, “so I wanted to do an exhibition that was a meditation on fashion and temporality.” The result, About Time: Fashion and Duration, underwritten by Louis Vuitton, allowed Bolton to explore his department’s own holdings in depth while building a history of fashion from 1870 to 2020—after which he looked at the spring and fall shows of 2020 to consider where fashion is going next. “I feel that fashion at the moment is grappling with ephemerality and impermanence,” Bolton says, “and I thought that drawing out the tensions—between change and endurance and transience and permanence and persistence—might be a nice way to create more of a consciousness about fashion going forward.” (Note: Because of the global health crisis, the exhibition opening has been postponed; it is now planned for October 29, while the date of the Met gala was still, as we went to press, being finalized.)
Bolton was inspired by the writings of the early-20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, who argued, as Bolton explains it, “that time exists as a continuous flow in which thoughts, feelings, and memories exist together—and that it makes no sense to separate them in the form of a linear sequence.” With this idea of the past coexisting with the present, Bolton, working with the multi-disciplinary artist/designer Es Devlin (whose recent work has included stage environments for Beyoncé, Kanye West, U2, Adele, and The Weeknd, among others; the set for The Lehman Trilogy; and 18 collections staged for Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton), has conceived the exhibition as a clock—“a study of 60 minutes of fashion,” as Bolton puts it—with 60 garments arranged in strict chronology to reveal a century and a half of evolving silhouettes and the body language that accompanied them.
Each of these pieces is “interrupted” in turn with a piece of clothing produced later in time (in some cases, centuries later) that explores the same silhouette, technique, or philosophy—“counter-chronologies of fashion that are nonlinear and nonsequential; knots or folds in time,” as Bolton describes them.
Some of these juxtapositions are literal citations—it is exciting, for instance, to see Yves Saint Laurent’s black velvet evening ensemble of fall 1978, its broad-shouldered jacket lavishly embroidered by Lesage to suggest a broken mirror, alongside Elsa Schiaparelli’s own winter 1938 ensemble (also embroidered by Lesage), which directly inspired it; or Azzedine Alaïa’s 1994 knitted chenille interpretation of Charles James’s slinky pleated jersey Sirène dress of 1951. An intriguing circa 1919 evening dress by the little-known fashion house Weeks, meanwhile, has a distinctive barrel-shaped skirt that is mimicked in a sequined dress from Rei Kawakubo’s astonishing fall 2012 Two Dimensional collection for Comme des Garçons.
Other designers have taken similar themes but interpreted them in very different ways. For his fall 1960 collection for Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent scandalized that establishment with his Chicago jacket, reinterpreting a biker jacket in crocodile and mink; when Karl Lagerfeld revisited the biker jacket for Chanel for fall 1991, he showed it with a T-shirt and a taffeta ball-gown skirt. (For fall 2011, Junya Watanabe, meanwhile, used biker leathers to brilliant effect to rethink Christian Dior’s emblematic Bar suit from the legendary couturier’s debut collection of spring 1947.)
While immersed in research, Bolton was struck by how designers have used the museum’s collections—“consciously or unconsciously”—as a vital resource through the years. John Galliano, for instance, came to study Madeleine Vionnet’s fabled bias-cut dresses of the 1920s and ’30s, and made her body-clinging technique a signature of his own. Fashion buffs, meanwhile, might be as surprised as Ghesquière was to see examples here from the cerebral London-based designer Georgina Godley’s Lump and Bump collection of fall 1986, which prefigures Rei Kawakubo’s own celebrated collection from a decade later—prime examples of two women designers exploring the idea of body dysmorphia through clothing. “An intention shared at some point is very interesting,” says Ghesquière.
Bolton himself was surprised by a 1965 collection by the chic American designer Norman Norell that paid explicit homage to pieces by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel from the 1920s that the designer had studied at the Costume Institute. Similar though the pieces are, “just by changing the proportions,” Bolton says, “Norell makes his versions look emphatically ’60s.” In the same way, a dress of swagged silk fringe by Raf Simons for Jil Sander (spring 2009) might take its cue from Madeleine Vionnet’s own swag fringe dress of 1925, but each garment looks indubitably of its time.
When Ghesquière first went to Balenciaga in 1997, accessing the extensive archive of historic pieces designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga himself was an immensely complicated process. “So I called the Met,” he remembers, “and they nicely opened the doors of the archive. It was the first time I really saw a beautiful collection of pieces from Cristóbal Balenciaga. It’s been precious to me—and a great learning process—to be able to access those archives.”
As the creative director for Louis Vuitton since 2013, Ghesquière returned to study the Met’s collection of 18th-century menswear, particularly the lavishly embroidered and brocaded vests and court coats. “It’s the most beautiful fashion library,” he says. Ghesquière took that research and reinterpreted some of the pieces for his memorable spring 2018 Vuitton collection, pairing scrupulously reinterpreted shapes and textiles with state-of-the-art trainers. “Nothing is ever like a carbon copy,” Ghesquière explains. “I love the fact that you had this woman that season that was clearly referencing these costume pieces, wearing this 18th--century frock coat, and at the same time was totally in movement, in action, with her sports clothes. I just found it very exciting.” In the exhibition, Bolton has paired a magnificent vest from this Vuitton collection with a sumptuous 1902 French women’s jacket embroidered to evoke a man’s late-18th-century waistcoat—the early-21st and early-20th-century eyes both looking back to prerevolutionary France.
Inspired by the power of artist Kara Walker’s disquieting silhouettes, Bolton has focused on garments that are essentially either black or white, complicating the selection process exponentially but amplifying the visual drama in equal measure. “What’s really fascinating to me—and what I’ve learned by spending time with Andrew and his department,” Devlin explains, “is that this exhibition is really 120 female bodies. We’re showing a kind of etymology of the architecture of the female form and all that that implies.” Devlin mentions the “emotional impact” of seeing the 19th-century pieces with their pinched-in waists and cumbersome bustles. “When I was studying theater design, we studied the history of architecture in parallel with the history of costume and the history of dress,” Devlin recalls. “It’s a really fun study to make: What happened when the corset vanished? In each inch that comes in and out of a sleeve or a waist or a butt or a hip, there’s so much implied about social, political, and cultural history.”
The exhibition’s handsome catalog is threaded with literary musings on the nature of time, largely taken from early-20th-century writers, including T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, who were so engaged with the subject. Woolf’s time-traveling, gender-fluid hero/heroine Orlando might be the muse of the exhibition. “For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?” writes Woolf in her 1928 novel of the same name. “That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning 1998 novel The Hours drew inspiration from Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, has written a short story, “Out of Time”, that considers a day in the life of one Odessa Bonthrop, beginning in the early morning of 1870 and ending 24 hours later in 2020.
It was director Sally Potter’s 1992 movie adaptation of Orlando, starring a suitably androgynous Tilda Swinton, that first fueled Bolton and Devlin’s ideas for staging the exhibition—particularly a beautiful scene that sees Swinton’s Orlando (costumed by Sandy Powell) enter a garden maze in mid-18th-century court costume and high powdered wig and leave it as a Victorian woman in the dress and hairstyle of a century later. An initial mazelike exhibition layout has now ceded to two rooms that evoke the idea of clocks—one of dark wood, “almost like the inside of a grandfather clock,” as Devlin explains, and the other of mirrors, “rather like walking into a Yayoi Kusama piece. Everything about your anatomy feels different when you’re in an enclosed, dark, wooden, completely hushed space as opposed to being in a vast, mirrored, expansive, reflective, fragmented one,” Devlin adds, “so it’s really an expression of how time felt—and how time now feels, because we all have a different relationship to time now than we would have in 1870.” The clock echoes the drama of Foucault’s pendulum of 1851, designed to illustrate the movement of the Earth and installed at the Panthéon in Paris, which Ghesquière showed Devlin.
The exhibition ends with a coda that will explore Bolton’s own take on fashion now—“whether it’s about sustainability or traceability, the ethics of fashion, or even the idea of looking back in time,” he says—and focusing on examples that “advocate for a slowing down of fashion and a reemphasis on the values inherent in its creation.” For him, these pieces include Demna Gvasalia’s dramatic revisiting of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s 1939 Infanta silhouette and Marine Serre’s stylish upcycling of deadstock tweed used with flea-market jewelry (“a combination of a Schiaparelli and a Chanel,” says Bolton, “and a wonderful conflation of two designers who were always at odds with each other—she reconciled them!”).
“I think it’s a quest of any designer to look for . . . I will not say ‘eternity,’ but a certain longevity in your work,” says Ghesquière, citing his pride in the value placed on his vintage Balenciaga pieces now. “It’s fashion, and it’s great to witness our time and to say, ‘This is what I feel for now, for exactly now, at this moment,’ but when your clothes live longer—when your style lives longer—I think that’s the best thing.”