The New York Met rereads all the fashion

It is under one of the two clocks of the former Orsay station, which in 1986 became the Orsay Museum, that the Metropolitan Museum of New York presented its flagship exhibition on Thursday, February 27, “About Time: Fashion and Duration» (May 7 to September 7, 2020). Its director, the daring Max Hollein, 50 years old and a very rich transatlantic career, came in person to present this project at 8:15 am, preceding the frantic race of Paris Fashion Week (the queen of Vogue, Anna Wintour, was there, spotless in the morning). This exhibition intends to break with the linear thread of the history of costume and will celebrate, in its quirky and cerebral way, the 150 years of the great American museum.

Son of the Viennese architect Hans Hollein (1934-2014), husband of the “Fashion designer” Nina Hollein, Max Hollein became in 2018 the 10th director of the Met and brought his well-balanced art of opening to it. It is as an art historian and a modern man that this ex-director of the Städel Museum and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, then of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he exhibited contemporary Muslim “modest fashion”, works. at the De Young Museum, just before his departure for New York. Direct, literate, open to debate, posed, he is this rather rare spokesperson for a museum story between past and future. Fashion, what she says about companies and its industries, fascinates him.

News especially for the exhibition

Star in the history of fashion as evidenced by his sober chic with omnipresent and discreet design, the British Andrew Bolton, director of the Costume Institute at the Met, has made a dazzling essay to present this project which will span 150 years of forms and thoughts. Quoting Baudelaire, “obsessed with modernity”, taking up the concept of “duration” from the philosopher Henri Bergson, cousin by marriage of Proust, and “this continuous flow of time which accumulates and is indivisible”, he will fight against the cadence accelerated collections and will restore a long time by this vast bouquet of fashion.

The great English novelist for whom time was the enemy, Virginia Woolf, will be its “ghost writer”, the phantom narrator who “suffers from the cruelty of the clock“. American writer and screenwriter Michael Cunningham, 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner for The Hours whose side stories refer to the great novel by Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, will write a short story especially for the exhibition and its audience.

«In recent years, time has been at the heart of conversations within the fashion community., emphasizes, with an undeniable talent as a speaker, Andrew Bolton. These conversations focused on the acceleration of fashion production, distribution and consumption in our digitally synchronized 21st century. And while large companies have benefited from this acceleration, digital capitalism and non-stop cadence, designers have often been forced to subject their creativity to continuous operation, seven days a week. interest of this opportune moment to explore the temporary nature of fashion from a historical point of view».

“The ephemeral, the fugitive and the contingent”

«Fashion was forged in the fires of modernization and industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries, so its anchoring is associated with the temporality of modernity ”, recalls Andre Bolton, emissary of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London at the Met in New York in 2002. “The first of the critics to establish a correlation between fashion and modernism was the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire was obsessed with the outlines of modern life which he pointed out in his 1863 essay, The painter of modern life (this collection of essays by Baudelaire, dealing with the painter and draftsman Constantin Guys was published in three episodes, on November 26 and 29 and December 3, 1863, by Le Figaro, and in 1869 in Romantic Art, Editor’s note). In this essay, he defines the term “modernity” as “the ephemeral, the fugitive and the contingent”. Baudelaire extended these concepts of modernity to the dialectic of fashion. For Baudelaire, fashion was the very hallmark of modernity through its endless evolution and its tireless new version of the new».

Welcoming “this valuation of time which nourishes fashion”, Nicolas Ghesquiere, artistic director of the Vuitton women collections, sponsoring house of the project, underlined his “admiration for the Met and the Costume Institute” where he has so often gone and from where he “returned, rich in a pattern, a idea”. “I was immediately enthusiastic about this project ‘About Time: Fashion and Duration’, because it reminds me of the intimate link between fashion and the notion of time. Not just because fashion is the mirror of the moment, but also because it plays such a significant role in shaping our future. At Louis Vuitton, fashion and time have been in constant dialogue for over 150 years and this relationship remains fundamental in my work.».

With great freshness and artistic humility, Nicolas Ghesquière has replaced himself as a creator in the history of societies and the arts. “The visits to the collections of the Met and the Costume Institute, the most important archives in the world, were essential for my research (…) Thanks to this fund, our creations are transformed into precious cultural works, portable treasures that will continue to be tell their stories and experiences about who we were, who we are and where we are heading ”.

“About Time: Fashion and Duration” exhibition, at the Met, New York, from May 7 to September 7.

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