The Citiblog

Costume Institute Two-Part Exhibition to Focus on American Fashion
April 12, 2021, 7:39.10 pm ET

Print


Photo: Melanie Schiff

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announcing plans for The Costume Institute’s next major exhibition: a two-part show on view from September 18, 2021 through September 5, 2022. Part One, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion—opening in the Anna Wintour Costume Center on September 18, 2021—will celebrate The Costume Institute’s 75th anniversary and explore a modern vocabulary of American fashion. Part Two, In America: An Anthology of Fashion—opening in the American Wing period rooms on May 5, 2022—will explore the development of American fashion by presenting narratives that relate to the complex and layered histories of those spaces.

In celebration of the first opening, a more intimate Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala) is scheduled for Monday, September 13, 2021, pending government guidelines.

Exhibition Overview

Part One—In America: A Lexicon of Fashion

The Costume Institute’s Anna Wintour Costume Center galleries will feature a fictional American home constructed of transparent walls that intersect and overlap, blurring the boundaries of the interior rooms. Examples of 20th- and 21st-century fashion will populate the rooms, reflecting the customs and behaviors of the imagined occupants. Designs by pioneers of American sportswear will be displayed alongside works by a diverse group of contemporary designers to illustrate a shifting emphasis in American fashion defined by feelings of fear, delight, comfort, anxiety, well-being, loneliness, happiness, belonging, self-reflection, and self-representation among other qualities.

Part Two—In America: An Anthology of Fashion

Opening May 5, 2022, Part Two of the exhibition will feature women’s and men’s historical and contemporary dress dating from the 18th century to the present in vignettes installed in select period rooms. The interiors present a survey of more than 300 years of American domestic life and tell a variety of stories—from the personal to the political, the stylistic to the cultural, and the aesthetic to the ideological. The exhibition will reflect on these narratives through a series of three-dimensional cinematic “freeze frames” produced in collaboration with notable American film directors. These mise-en-scènes will explore the role of dress in shaping American identity and address the complex and layered histories of the rooms.

For more information visit https://www.metmuseum.org/

Image: "VEIL FLAG" by S.R. STUDIO. LA. CA., 2020. Courtesy of Sterling Ruby Studio. Photography by Melanie Schiff.

Comments:
^Top