After a six month delay from the initial opening date in May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition is finally here. While the opening is typically a major fashion moment replete with excitement and glamour of the Met Gala, the exhibition opened its doors more quietly on Monday with virtual remarks by the museum’s director Max Hollein, Louis Vuitton women’s artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, and exhibition designer Es Devlin,  as well as a digital exhibition tour led by Andrew Bolton, the museum’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute.

Titled About Time: Fashion and Duration, the exhibition spans over 150 years of fashion history, from 1870 to the present. Although no one could have predicted the state of the world this year, the theme is more timely than ever.

“When I first heard about the exhibition, it’s central idea of fashion intimately linked to the notion of time felt particularly compelling,” Ghesquière said. “As a designer, I have always looked to marry silhouettes, techniques, memories, and impressions from the past with the latest technology to create fashion for today that peeks to the future. Of course, since then COVID-19 has effected the world profoundly, even making ourselves questions our own rapport with time itself. Yet, the pause the pandemic has imposed on many of us has also created certain space to reflect upon where we are and where we are going even in the most troubling times, heart fashion and couture can help us navigate change and frame how we see the world anew,”

The collection space was interpreted by Devlin, who is a stage designer known for her large-scale performance sculpture and environments for theater sets and arena shows for some of the world’s most prominent artists. With a design inspired by the shape of a clock — and 60 tick marks that each contain two ensembles — the exhibition explores two timelines of fashion history – one linear, the other non-linear. This reflects time as interpreted by philosopher Henri Bergson, who viewed time as continuous flow relationship between past and present is coexistence.

“The Met Costume collection could be considered a dense 150-year clock of the architecture of the female form,” said Devlin. “One and a half centuries worth of garments, each recording delicate calibrations, shifts of breathing in of the form and expanding out of the form. Spikes, dents, dimples, bulges, and inhales and exhales of the architecture of female form effectively. The idea of turning this into a clock is very compelling. How do you make an audience not just understand it know it but feel it physically? How do you allow an audience to experience those contractions and expansions of their own pathway as they make their way through the exhibition?”

If nothing else, this time in fashion has been for many members of the industry, a period for reflection. The industry has always operated on an accelerated timeline, and this year members of every aspect of the industry have been forced to slow down and take some time to think about the adverse impact of this operating speed – creatively, mentally, and environmentally. The Met is no exception, making the decision to pull nearly all looks from their museum archive, with the exception of a few donations.

“Recently, time has dominated discussions in the fashion industry, and these conversations have centered around the accelerated production circulation and consumption of fashion to meet the commercial demand of an interconnected and digitally synchronized world. But we’re realizing these demands have a detrimental effect not only on creativity but also on the environment. We thought it might be a good time to explore the temporal character of fashion from a historical perspective,” said Bolton.

The result is a magnificent curation of archived pieces that illustrate the transformative nature of fashion. Mostly in shades of black, gray, and neutrals that accentuate the silhouette and construction, each piece shows that everything comes back around again in some way, shape, or form.

American fashion has a strong presence, with looks from designers like Charles James and Stephen Burrows, as well as Virgil Abloh for Off-White and Shayne Oliver for Hood by Air. A standout, though, is a white gown by Viktor & Rolf from the duo’s Spring-Summer 2020 haute couture collection. It embodies the beauty of collaboration, community, and sustainability, and is the perfect finale for this must-see exhibition.