The museum announced the annual fundraising event’s 2020 theme, “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” on Thursday and said the accompanying spring exhibition, inspired by the 1992 Sally Porter film Orlando, will present a century-and-a-half of fashion history.
Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Met’s Costume Institute, told Vogue on Thursday that the “nuanced and open-ended” exhibition is a “reimagining of fashion history that’s fragmented, discontinuous, and heterogeneous” based on Porter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling novel of the same name and early-20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theories on time being indivisible.
“There’s a wonderful scene 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 reemerges in 1850s England, That’s where the original idea came from,” Bolton told Vogue. “What I like about Woolf’s version of time is the idea of a continuum. There’s no beginning, middle, or end. It’s one big fat middle. I always felt the same about fashion. Fashion is the present.”
The exhibition will highlight a variety of “folds in time” and showcase the juxtapositions between designers across various eras with 160 women’s fashion pieces from the last century-and-a-half. It is expected to run from May 7 through September 7, 2020, with the Met Gala scheduled for May 4.
As usual, Anna Wintour will co-chair the Met Gala committee along with Louis Vutton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Emma Stone. Meryl Streep, who will appear at the Met Gala for the first time ever, will join them on the committee.
The invitation-only event will likely bring out the biggest names in fashion and Hollywood, and, of course, their over-the-top embodiments of the theme.
Celebrities like Lady Gaga, Billy Porter, Kim Kardashian and Cardi B pulled out all the stops at this year’s event, the theme of which was “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” The Gala was inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, which illustrated the idea of camp as “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
