Met Gala — and not only on the red carpet. A group of top film directors including Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Regina King and last year’s Oscar winner Chloé Zhao will be a key part of the Costume Institute exhibit launching the gala in May.
Star curator Andrew Bolton on Tuesday announced the list of
eight directors who will create what he called “cinematic vignettes” in the
period rooms of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The other
four are Janicza Bravo, Julie Dash, Autumn de Wilde and Tom Ford, the
celebrated fashion designer who is also a film director.
The latest exhibit — “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” —
is actually the second part of a major two-part show exploring the roots of
American fashion. The first part opened in September along with a pared-down
“mini-gala,” one of two galas planned within one year as the Costume Institute
grapples with pandemic restrictions, like every other arts institution.
This exhibit, to open along with what the museum hopes will
be a full-sized gala on May 2 — a return to the traditional first Monday in May
— will feature about 100 examples of men’s and women’s fashion from the 19th to
the mid-late 20th century.
Whereas Part One, which will remain on display in the rooms
of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, explores “a new language of American
fashion,” Part Two looks at “unfamiliar sartorial narratives filtered through
the imaginations of some of America’s most visionary film directors,” Bolton
said in remarks Tuesday.
In addition, some of the garments that have been on display
in Part One will be rotated out next month, to include other designers not yet
featured. That exhibit attempts to focus on themes of social justice, diversity
and inclusivity, and body acceptance. And youth: A majority of its garments
come from younger designers, many of whom have never had their creations shown
in a museum, Bolton said when it opened in September.
On Tuesday, Bolton and museum director Max Hollein told a
press gathering at the museum that each of the eight directors would create
their own “fictional cinematic vignettes, or ‘freeze frames,’” within specific
American Wing period rooms. The exhibit would focus, they said, on key
individuals shaping American fashion through history, most of them women, and
many of them overlooked by history — not just designers but tailors and
dressmakers, for example.
Bolton said Scorsese would show his work in a 20th- century
living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and King in a 19th-century parlor
from Richmond, Virginia.
De Wilde will show hers in the Baltimore and Benkard Rooms;
Zhao in a Shaker Retiring Room from the 1830s; Bravo in the Rococo Revival
Parlor and Gothic Revival Library; Coppola in the McKim, Mead and White Stair
Hall and Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room; Dash in the Greek Revival Parlor
and Renaissance Revival Room; and Ford in the gallery showcasing John
Vanderlyn’s panoramic 1819 mural of Versailles.
Bolton also explained that six “case studies” will appear in
the galleries, offering an in-depth look — “almost forensic analyses,” he said
— at historical garments important to the history of fashion. Examples, he
said, would include outfits believed worn by Abraham Lincoln and George
Washington.
The celebrity co-chairs of the May gala have yet to be
announced. In September, they were actor Timothée Chalamet, musician Billie
Eilish, poet Amanda Gorman and tennis star Naomi Osaka.
The Met Gala is a huge money-maker for the museum, and provides the Costume Institute with its main source of funding. “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” opens to the public May 7, five days after the May 2 gala, and runs until September 5, along with Part One. -AP
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