The Theme For The 2020 Met Gala Is About Time
Very few in Hollywood seemed to grasp the concept of Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp theme from last year’s Met Gala. Camp should have been a slam dunk, but we are living in supremely stupid times. I get it though, camp is subjective. There’s still a war raging somewhere on the internet over whether or not a giant foam hamburger is campy (IMO: it wasn’t at the time, but it is now). Thankfully, Vogue just revealed the theme for the The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute 2020 Met Gala, and it’s less of a thinker. The theme is About Time: Fashion and Duration. The bad news is that it’s inspired by the writings of Virginia Woolf. The good news is, at least for the Koven, is that there’s a movie version.
According to Vogue:
In keeping with the year’s theme, today the Met announced that the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition will showcase a century-and-a-half of fashion history culled from its archive and presented along a “disruptive” timeline. “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” says Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, takes a “nuanced and open-ended” approach. “It’s a reimagining of fashion history that’s fragmented, discontinuous, and heterogeneous.”
That’s a lot of SAT words to describe Back To The Future: But Make It Fashion. The movie Orlando starring Tilda Swinton was the initial inspiration for the theme. Really, they could have saved everybody a lot of headaches trying to read all those words and just set the theme as Tilda Swinton: That’s It, That’s The Theme.
Bolton found inspiration for the exhibition in the 1992 Sally Potter film Orlando, which was based on the time-traveling Virginia Woolf novel of the same name. “There’s a wonderful scene,” he says, “in which Tilda Swinton enters the maze in an 18th-century woman’s robe à la Francaise, and as she runs through it, her clothes change to mid-19th-century dress, and she reemerges in 1850s England. That’s where the original idea came from.”
Here’s that scene.
MET 2020 theme: ‘About Time: Fashion and Duration’. Curator of the Costume Institute Andrew Bolton has found the inspiration for this next Met Gala 2020 in ‘Orlando’, the movie directed by Sally Potter in 1992 based on the novel by Virginia Woolf. pic.twitter.com/k0UJimlcr6
— 🍸 (@diorangxl) November 7, 2019
In The Met’s exhibition on the same theme, “Virginia Woolf acts as the show’s ‘ghost narrator,’ with quotes from her time-based books including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse appearing throughout the exhibition.” Additionally, Michael Cunningham who wrote The Hours (a re-imagining of Mrs. Dalloway), will be contributing a short story to the exhibition. And The Hours’ own Mrs. Dalloway, Meryl Streep, will co-chair the gala along with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Emma Stone.
For those celebs and stylists unwilling to do their homework, a few folks on Twitter have kindly offered some suggestions.
free met gala ideas:
– melting dali clock ballgown that drips onto the floor and actually tells time
– gwyneth's daughter makes her debut, is an apple 2 watch
– scott bakula wears tom ford
– kate and leopold couple's costume but gender reversal— rachel syme (@rachsyme) November 7, 2019
The Met gala theme is time and fashion and I would do Reese Witherspoon’s looks in Pleasantville w one half of me in color in 1998 and half of me black and white in the 50s. But I will not be invited so that’s an idea I just gave her team for free
— Natalie Walker (@nwalks) November 7, 2019
Okay these are my Met Gala: About Time ideas.
-Elizabethan bodice and ruff collar, bootcut jeans, Reformation shoes
-Helen of Troy but Fabeltics and my hair is high-school-it's-my-birthday noodle curls
-Billowy white Byronic hero shirt, 1970s hot pants, my legs are holograms— Cat Sholtis (@27CatSholtis27) November 7, 2019
Met legend Rihanna missed the Gala last year but has personally promised Anna Wintour that she’d show up for 2020. And she’s finally got some competition since Billy Porter decided to come out to play (and slay). I expect a lot of powdered wigs to be blown and Falva Flav clocks to be stopped in their tracks by the time Billy and RiRi are done stomping the stairs down.
Pic: Wenn.com