Met Gala Theme 2020: 'About Time: Fashion and Duration' Honors's Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando'

Surreal, David Bailey, 1980 Photo: Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Photo © David Bailey

Andrew Bolton, Head Curator of the New York Met’s Art’s Costume Institute has announced the theme for next May’s event. Acknowledging the advent of a new decade of the 2020’s, Bolton announced the next Costume Exhibit exhibition called ‘About Time: Fashion and Duration’.

According to the New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman, this year’s theme is “inspired in part by the novels of Virginia Woolf and the theories of the early-20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose admittedly somewhat obscure but also important musings on time posited it as a constantly mutating stream rather than a series of discrete moments.”

“I wanted to do an exhibition focused on the collection, but not a traditional masterworks exhibition,” Bolton said. “Something that connects to the zeitgeist, and what people are talking about now.” Then he had an idea. And then he thought, “it’s about time.”

“Fashion is indelibly connected to time,” Bolton continued, talking to the Times who announced the upcoming exhibit. “It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times.”

The Clock, Sarah Moon, 1999Credit...Sarah Moon, via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Friedman says the upcoming 2020 show “may be the most conceptually abstract blockbuster the Costume Institute has attempted, toggling between what Mr. Bolton calls the ‘objective’ time of the calendar and the ‘subjective’ time of creativity – will take the form of 160 pieces of women’s fashion created over the past 150 years.

This topic is front and center in the fashion industry, as creativity is increasingly subordinated to the demands of more, more, more and give-it-to-me-now collusion of business and consumers.

The Times notes that the show, itself, will be designed by Esmeralda ‘Es’ Devlin, who was responsible for the sets for Beyoncé’s “Formation” tour, as well as many Royal Opera House productions. The catalog will contain a new short story written in the show’s honor by Michael Cunningham, the author of the “Mrs. Dalloway”-inspired novel “The Hours.”

The show will be chaired by Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton, who is also underwriting the May 4, 2020 event. Ghesquière will be joined by Vuitton ambassador Emma Stone, actor Meryl Streep , who starred in ‘The Hours’, Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anna Wintour, of course.