MET Gala 2020 - Dress Code: Timeless
Image Credit @murrayc
First Monday of every May, since 1948, is reserved for the biggest fashion night in the United States. No, I don’t mean The Oscars. The grandest fête has to be The Costume Institute benefit, also known as The Met Gala, Met Ball, “Oscars of the East Coast,” or “Super Bowl of Fashion.” The event boasts quite an impressive list of guests from entertainment, fashion, business, sports, and music. I read somewhere that the contribution for a seat at the 2019 Met Gala was about $30,000 and understand why the event remains the main source of funding for The Costume Institute.
This year marks a milestone for the Metropolitan Museum of Art as it celebrates its 150th anniversary with the grand opening of the Costume’s Institute’s annual fashion exhibition. And if we put aside all the glamour, glitz, and elitism that accompanies The Met Gala red carpet – this year’s theme “About Time: Fashion and Duration” somehow feels significant on a larger scale at this time of our collective history and evolution. So, I allowed myself to be bold and dub this year’s gala as The Art Show.
“The art we wear and live with is the art we become. Art—fashion and otherwise—reflects who we are and who we aspire to be.”
The fashion, just like art, used to be reserved only for the wealthy and privileged. Importance of fashion is on the same level as the importance of paintings, literature, music and architecture as it gives us a way to understand how our ancestors and different cultures lived in the past. The easiest way to understand history, short of hopping in a time machine, is to look at the paintings or the fashions of the past. It’s true, you can tell a lot about a certain country, its culture and history just by looking at the way people dressed.
Today, fashion has become a way of life, a way to express yourself and your values, and bring people from all different walks of life together. However, there is an ugly side of fashion too and all negative effects that fashion industry created in our society – from fast fashion and consumerism, to illegal manufacturing practices, negative body image, and global warming.
“History of fashion is the history of life” and that’s why this year’s Met Gala speaks volumes to me. The curators of the The Costume Institute – Andrew Bolton and Wendy Yu – found an inspiration for this year’s gala in the Sally Potter film Orlando, based on time traveling Virginia Wolf novel. In a sense they wanted to liken fashion to time as a continuum, something that flows and has no beginning, middle or end but just exists in the present. (Phepls, Vogue)
And in words of Bolton himself: “Fashion teaches us to tell time differently. It shows us that there is more to time than what you can count on the fingers of your hands or on the hands of your clock. We wanted to rethink our collection through a concept that reflected the fashion zeitgeist, one that we felt was very timely and topical… In recent years, time has dominated discussions within the fashion community. These talks are centered around the accelerated production, circulation, and consumption of fashion in the digitally synchronized world, the 21st century. Unquestionably companies have benefited from this sped-up, around-the-clock temporality of digital capitalism, but designers have often been creatively constrained by its 24/7, continuous functioning. So we thought it might be an opportune moment to explore the temporal character of fashion from a historical perspective.” (Leitch, Vogue)
“All art is imbued with the energy and passion an artist breathes into it. A painting has power. A properly-made tweed jacket has power.”
As I write this, each designer is already hard at work using cloth and stitches instead of brushes and paint, to create their piece, infusing it with energy, life, and passion to arrive at the living expression of their art that we will get to see on the red carpet. Looking forward to seeing this culturally important Art Show. It’s going to be magical!