November 9, 2019
The 150th anniversary of the Met Gala will take place on May 7, 2020, and the theme has officially been revealed: About Time: Fashion and Duration. The chair committee this year includes Louis Vuitton, artistic director, Nicolas Ghesquière, Anna Wintour, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Emma Stone. We also have the legendary, Meryl Streep, co-chairing the Gala. The 2020 Gala will be the Academy Award winning actress's first-ever attendance. Fitting as Streep portrayed Mrs Dalloway in the film ,The Hours, and an Anna Wintour inspired character in The Devil Wears Prada.
To celebrate a selection of 160 women’s fashion pieces from the last century and a half and new acquisitions will be on display for the 2020 Collections Initiative in honor of the anniversary. The exhibition will be presented in the Met Fifth Avenue’s - Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, made possible by Louis Vuitton. Es Devlin, a visual artist and stage designer has been hired for the exhibition design. About Time: Fashion and Duration will be on view at the Costume Institute from May 7 through September 7, 2020.
Andrew Bolton, Curator of the Costume Institute, describes this year’s exhibit as “a reimagining of fashion history that’s fragmented, discontinuous, and heterogeneous” and that the inspiration came from the 1992 film Orlando, directed by Sally Potter and starring Tilda Swinton, based on Virginia Woolf’s book. Orlando, born a man, becomes a woman whose life spans multiple centuries as she’s witness to history, lives in the present, and a symbol for the future.