Fashion's Past And Present Commune At New York's Met

New York, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Oct, 2020 ) :Whether by repetition, rupture or reinvention, fashion has always maintained a complex relationship to time, a link New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is exploring in a new exhibition opening Thursday.

The show, delayed for months by the pandemic, was also tweaked last minute to take into account the Black Lives Matter movement that galvanized the nation this summer.

Normally the city's social event of the year, 2020's Met Gala organized by Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour -- which usually opens the costume exhibit -- was cancelled, like every major indoor gathering since mid-March.

To fete the 150th anniversary of the Met, Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Costume Institute, aimed to highlight the museum's own collection that includes 33,000 pieces of clothing and accessories.

"When I began working on the show, it started off as this sort of meditation on fashion and temporality," he told a press preview of the exhibit entitled "About Time," which will run until February 7.

But Bolton didn't want to focus on chronology, instead presenting concepts in pairs -- two pieces, two parallel time periods with similar aesthetics, for a 124-piece show featuring a single gown to close.

"By having past and present coexist together, it sort of takes you outside of the confine of chronology and makes you think about time very differently," Bolton said.

For Max Hollein, the Met's director, "fashion captures, like very few other artforms, a time and a spirit -- and projects it forward."