About Time
Fashion and Duration
Published on 9. June 2020
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-1-58839-688-4 (ISBN)
Description
Traces fashions from 1870 to the present along a conceptual, disruptive, and nontraditional timeline of fashion history?
About Time: Fashion and Duration traces the evolution of fashion, from 1870 to the present, through a linear timeline of iconic garments, each paired with an alternate design that jumps forward or backward in time. These unexpected pairings, which relate to one another through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration, create a disruptive fashion chronology that conflates notions of past, present, and future.
Virginia Woolf serves as "ghost narrator," and excerpts from her novels reflect on the passage of time with each subsequent pairing. A new short story by Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Hours, recounts a day in the life of a woman over a time span of 150 years through her changing fashions. Scholar Theodore Martin analyzes theoretical responses to the nature of time, underscoring that time is not simply a sequence of historical events. Fashion photographer Nicholas Alan Cope captures 120 fashions with sublime black-and-white photography. This stunning book reveals fashion's paradoxical connection to linear notions of time.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(October 29, 2020-February 7, 2021)
About Time: Fashion and Duration traces the evolution of fashion, from 1870 to the present, through a linear timeline of iconic garments, each paired with an alternate design that jumps forward or backward in time. These unexpected pairings, which relate to one another through shape, motif, material, pattern, technique, or decoration, create a disruptive fashion chronology that conflates notions of past, present, and future.
Virginia Woolf serves as "ghost narrator," and excerpts from her novels reflect on the passage of time with each subsequent pairing. A new short story by Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Hours, recounts a day in the life of a woman over a time span of 150 years through her changing fashions. Scholar Theodore Martin analyzes theoretical responses to the nature of time, underscoring that time is not simply a sequence of historical events. Fashion photographer Nicholas Alan Cope captures 120 fashions with sublime black-and-white photography. This stunning book reveals fashion's paradoxical connection to linear notions of time.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(October 29, 2020-February 7, 2021)
Reviews / Votes
"The intriguing, non-linear format has the bustles of late nineteenth-century mourning dresses compared with Alexander Mcqueen's risque 'bumster' skirts...Threaded through with Virginia Woolf quotes, it's proof that fashion can be thought-provoking - as well as provocative."-Francesca Carington, Tatler"Outfits are shown in their entirety and in detail in a series of handsome black-and-white photographs...The wide-ranging essay by literary scholar Theodore Martin is thought provoking, not least because it was written back in the day when being pressed for time was the common condition."-Emily King, V&A Magazine
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
240 color illus.
Dimensions
Height: 318 mm
Width: 241 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-58839-688-4 (9781588396884)
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Schweitzer Classification