About Time: Fashion and Duration
Now through February 7 of 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show meant to have us ponder fashion cycles, and style trends, and borrowing of styles through time. Or, as they write: “it explores how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future. Virginia Woolf serves as the “ghost narrator” of the exhibition.” So there you are.
You will notice that sometimes the idea is to juxtapose fashions from different times with similar ideas or shapes. Sometimes, the idea is simply made more obvious. So you find a web-like evening dress from the late 1920s and then a spider web dress by John Galliano in 1997. (Notice the handkerchief hemline of the 1920s which finessed the difference between long and short, while the next evneing dress from 1930 definitely hits the floor). Other times, it means taking what an ornamental idea like unreal bows and showing it next to an effort to make something impossible to wear with them. See Viktor & Rolf’s suit from 2005 versus Madeleine Vionnet evening dress with applique bows from 1939. Then you can take an interest in a certain body part, like the bustle and its absurd inflation of the female backside with an absurd revelation of the backside. So you have an American afternoon dress in silk from around 1870s and Alexander McQueen’s Bumster” Skirt from the fall/winter of 1995–96.
The exhibition tickets are timed, so you need to buy them ahead of time. For more info, and more pictures including some video if you can’t actually go, click here: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2020/about-time
