About Time: Fashion and Duration

Bolton, Andrew, with Jan Glier Reeder, Jessica Regan, and Amanda Garfinkel; introduction by Theodore Martin; short story by Michael Cunningham; photography by Nicholas Alan Cope (2020)

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“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 1928

About Time: Fashion and Duration traces the evolution of fashion, from 1870 to the present, through a linear timeline of iconic garments, each paired with an alternate design that jumps forward or backward in time. These unexpected pairings, which relate to one another through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration, create a unique and disruptive fashion chronology that conflates notions of past, present, and future.

Virginia Woolf serves as “ghost narrator”: excerpts from her novels reflect on the passage of time with each subsequent plate pairing. A new short story by Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Hours, recounts a day in the life of a woman over a time span of 150 years through her changing fashions. Scholar Theodore Martin analyzes theoretical responses to the nature of time, underscoring that time is not simply a sequence of historical events. And fashion photographer Nicholas Alan Cope illustrates 120 fashions with sublime black and-white photography. This stunning book reveals fashion’s paradoxical connection to linear notions of time.

Table of contents

Sponsor’s Statement

Director’s Foreword

Sixty Minutes of Fashion
Andrew Bolton

On Time
Theodore Martin

Plates

Out of Time
Michael Cunningham

Plate Entries, Credits, and Acknowledgments

About the authors

Andrew Bolton is Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Jan Glier Reeder is a Curatorial Consultant.

Jessica Regan is Associate Curator, The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Amanda Garfinkel is Assistant Curator, The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Theodore Martin is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.

Michael Cunningham is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Hours.

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Costume in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Exhibition

About Time: Fashion and Duration

October 29, 2020–February 7, 2021

The Costume Institute's spring 2020 exhibition will trace a century and a half of fashion—from 1870 to the present—along a disruptive timeline, on the occasion of The Met's 150th anniversary. Employing Henri Bergson's concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future. Virginia Woolf will serve as the "ghost narrator" of the exhibition.

A timeline of 120 fashions will unfold in two adjacent galleries fabricated as enormous clock faces and organized around the principle of sixty minutes of fashion. Each "minute" will feature a pair of garments—the primary work representing the linear nature of fashion and the secondary work its cyclical character. Each pair will be connected through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration. For example, a black silk faille princess-line dress from the late 1870s will be paired with an Alexander McQueen "Bumster" skirt from 1995. All of the primary garments will be black, to emphasize their evolving silhouettes, and the secondary will be either black or white, to underscore their mutually reinforcing associations.

The exhibition will conclude with a small selection of garments from 2020 that link the concept of duration to debates about diversity, inclusivity, sustainability, traceability, transparency, longevity, collaboration, and other ethical issues germane to the next decade of fashion.

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