Exhibition Tour—About Time: Fashion and Duration with Andrew Bolton | Met Fashion

Summary

Andrew Bolton guides viewers through About Time: Fashion and Duration, an exhibition marking The Met’s 150th anniversary. The show explores fashion’s tension between change and endurance, and between ephemerality and persistence. It also considers how fashion’s increasingly rapid production, circulation, and consumption can harm creativity and the environment.

The exhibition uses two interwoven timelines:

• Linear timeline: Presents 60 ensembles in chronological order, from 1870 onward, highlighting fashion’s drive for novelty and obsolescence.
• Nonlinear timeline: Interrupts that sequence with 60 ensembles connected to earlier designs through silhouette, motif, material, technique, or decoration.

The garments are primarily black to make their changing shapes and relationships easier to see. The two timelines are arranged like enormous clocks, with 60 illuminated marks referencing the minutes in an hour. Their pairings express philosopher Henri Bergson’s idea of duration: time as a continuous flow in which past and present coexist, rather than simply succeed one another.

Virginia Woolf serves as the exhibition’s “ghost narrator.” Passages about time are read in the galleries by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. The tour’s examples show how designers quote, transform, or challenge earlier fashions:

• A 19th-century princess-line dress is paired with Alexander McQueen’s radical reworking of the silhouette, which exposes the lower back.
• Yohji Yamamoto’s coat uses a nylon puff to echo the volume of a bustle.
• Rei Kawakubo turns 1890s-inspired jackets into an asymmetrical outfit, displacing and twisting their sleeves.
• Nicolas Ghesquière combines historical references with contemporary details, including a woven floral pattern and athletic shorts.
• Virgil Abloh’s “little black dress” uses quotation marks to acknowledge Chanel’s influential design.
• Elsa Schiaparelli’s broken-mirror decoration and Yves Saint Laurent’s later mirror jacket connect fashion to ideas of courage, confidence, and wartime symbolism.
• Later examples reinterpret familiar forms—including the chemise dress, the tuxedo, and the embellished evening dress—through zippers, deconstruction, illusion, and exaggerated decoration.

The exhibition concludes with a patchwork dress by Viktor & Rolf, made from surplus fabric swatches from earlier collections. The piece represents a move toward slow fashion, emphasizing handcraft, shared labor, quality, longevity, and sustainability.

Artistic Techniques and Concepts

• Historical quotation and reinterpretation: Designers revisit earlier silhouettes and details, changing their scale, construction, or meaning.
• Deconstruction: Garments are cut asymmetrically, ripped, twisted, left unfinished, or assembled from repurposed pieces.
• Silhouette and volume: Bustles, puffs, sleeves, and skirts reshape the body or evoke earlier fashions.
• Material and surface effects: Examples include nylon inserts, fractured mirror effects, crystals, beads, pearls, lace, and layered plastics.
• Construction as decoration: Zippers trace the body; necklaces can support a dress as well as ornament it; seams and draping become visible design features.
• Upcycling and reuse: Vintage tuxedos, historical references, and surplus fabric are transformed into new designs.
• Sustainability and slow fashion: The closing work highlights conscious use of materials, craft, collaboration, and durability.
• Time as a design principle: The exhibition’s pairings make past and present appear together, rather than treating fashion as a simple progression.

Creators and Contributors Featured

The designers and makers discussed include Charles Frederick Worth, Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, Mrs. Arnold, Rei Kawakubo, Nicolas Ghesquière, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, Virgil Abloh, Elsa Schiaparelli, Yves Saint Laurent, Bertha Black Lurie, Martin Margiela, Rudi Gernreich, Azzedine Alaïa, Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, Sarah Burton, Jun Takahashi, Christian Dior, Iris van Herpen, Charles James, and Viktor & Rolf.

Other creators and contributors mentioned include Andrew Bolton (the tour’s curator), Virginia Woolf, philosopher Henri Bergson, author Michael Cunningham, actors Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, and artist Philip Beesley.