About Time: Fashion and Duration, the exhibition at The Costume Institute at The Met in New York is coming to a close on February 7. The show, which began last year during the pandemic, traces fashion from 1870 to the present “along a disruptive timeline” on the occasion of the museum’s 150th anniversary. It explores how clothes relate to time, move through time, bringing together past, present and future. “Virginia Woolf serves as the ‘ghost narrator’ of the exhibition,” says The Met, or The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as it was originally called.

The show is built around Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée (duration). In two adjacent galleries, each “minute” features a pair of garments, illustrating Bergson’s idea of the past and the present co-existing. One work is like the other, in cut, fabric and detailing, but is also different.

For example, featured with a dress by Jean Paul Gaultier (French, born 1952), from fall/winter 1984– 85, is the “Tulip” evening dress, 1949, Charles James (American, 1906–1978). But which is the fashion and which the disruption? Does time only flow forward?