The Met brings back the glamor of the golden age of the United States in its great annual fashion exhibition

The fashion gala of the Metropolitan Museum of New York (Met) has a less fleeting and sparkling face than the cataract of flashes that makes it the planetary event that it is.

This is the spring exhibition of the Costume Institute, a department of the museum that is financed thanks to the great media event for the inauguration of a sample that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Met every year.

New York aspires to turn the page on the pandemic by recovering the more than 60 million tourists who visited it each year, and the fashion exhibition is an undeniable magnet.

The 2018 one on the influence of Catholicism in fashion broke all attendance records and became the most popular in the institution's 150-year history: 1.7 million visits, at a rate of 11,000 a day.

Among the ten most viewed exhibitions at the Met are Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the Impressionists and up to 4 of the exhibitions at the Costume Institute, today baptized as the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

Among them, the one dedicated to Alexander McQueen in 2011, with more than 660,000 visitors in three months.

Its history began in 1948 as a midnight soiree for a handful of New York socialites, and it wasn't even held at the Met.

More than 70 years later, the gala and the exhibition, sponsored by Instagram, are two sides of the same coin: the celebration of fashion as an exponent of a living culture, in movement.

The gala, held every first Monday in May, just before the exhibition opens, finances the exhibition —it raised 16.4 million dollars in the last call, still half gas due to the pandemic—;

and the sample stands as a great mirror, as well as a style reference that recommends, although it does not require, the dress code for the event.

This year's is label and “

, in reference to the period of the United States known as the Golden Age, between 1870 and 1891 and in which the country experienced unprecedented economic, industrial and demographic expansion, but also characterized by social conflict and inequalities.

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But what is the Met Gala and why not all the money in the world guarantees a ticket?

Under the title

, and curated by the institute's star curator, Andrew Bolton, it covers a hundred women's and men's pieces from the mid-19th century to the last decades of the 20th, but especially revolves around the called

(golden age), the epiphany of the great fortunes linked to the railway or mining between 1870 and 1900 whose aesthetic seeded the Big Apple with magnificent buildings, such as the permanent headquarters of the Frick Collection or the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, a few blocks from the Met.

It is no coincidence that the glitter of gold also shimmers in one of HBO's main bets of the year, the series

.

A room from the assembly of the exhibition 'In the United States: an anthology of fashion', of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, which opens in May 2022. Slaven Vlasic (AFP)

The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, occupies the period rooms of the American wing of the museum, and recovers the work of not particularly well-known designers and dressmakers, "the footnotes in the annals of the history of fashion", in Bolton's definition.

Forgotten but relevant names, such as Ann Lowe, the African-American designer who learned to sew with her grandmother and made Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding dress to marry future President John F. Kennedy in 1953.

There are also archival items, such as a jacket believed to have been worn by George Washington at his inauguration in 1789, and two Brooks Brothers pieces, one worn by Abraham Lincoln;

the other, a livery worn by an unnamed slave, around 1857-65.

The dialogue that is established between decorations and clothing reflects the historical and socioeconomic evolution of the country, from the pioneer communities, of Spartan austerity, to the post-war middle class, the great motor of consumption, also of fashion, passing, how no, because of the forging of the industrial bourgeoisie and

at the end of the 19th century, which gave its name to the golden age and turned the Big Apple into the deliquescent setting for Edith Warton's stories.

Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan Museum's exhibition "In America: An Anthology of Fashion," prepares one of the pieces for a preview showing in February 2022. Taylor Hill (WireImage)

The Institute has commissioned eight filmmakers to create a special staging, with vignettes or dramatic representations of the clothing.

Among them are the veteran Martin Scorsese, the self-confessed

Sofia Coppola, who gave a punk version of Marie Antoinette;

fellow designer Tom Ford, a master of interior design as he demonstrated in his two celebrated films;

and Chloé Zhao, director of the Oscar-winning

.

Coppola has had to

the room that recreates a hall of a mansion in Buffalo (New York) from the 1880s, one of the first commissions to an architecture and interior design firm.

Ford recreates the gallery where John Vanderlyn's 1819 Versailles panoramic mural hangs through a beautiful aerial choreography of dresses that evokes the spirit of the famous

, a 1973 encounter in France between European and American designers.

Scorsese is in charge of clothing the minimalist contemporaneity of a 20th century room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Zhao, of

the cell of a religious community of the 1830s.

A scene created by Martin Scorsese for the New York Met exhibition "In America: An Anthology of Fashion," featuring designs by Charles James in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired room, in May 2022. Charles Sykes (AP)

The interaction of container and content allows to go from the stylistic to the cultural and from the aesthetic to the ideological.

The social, cultural and artistic narratives of the spaces amplify and contextualize the key themes of the exhibition: the beginning of an identifiable American style and the epiphany of the designer with a name and surnames, recognized for an artistic vision of his own.

Names like Halston —whose figure has recovered a Netflix miniseries—, Anne Klein and Oscar de la Renta are the best known of the sample.

Of the rest, about twenty, "many of the names are not familiar."

"The ultimate ambition is to make people think differently about fashion history," Bolton stressed on Sunday.

Jill Biden, wife of the US president, attended the formal presentation of the exhibition on Monday.

She then visited the exhibition, accompanied by Bolton and the person in charge of the American wing of the museum, in an act closed to the press.

In America: A Fashion Anthology

is the second part of an exhibition that opened last September under the title

, also curated by Bolton and commemorating the institute's 75th anniversary.

Both can be visited until September 5;

the first part, subjected to certain updates, in the Anna Wintour Costume Center.

“

uncovers unknown clothing narratives filtered through the imaginations of some of America's most visionary filmmakers,” Bolton summarized.

"Through these largely unknown stories, you get a nuanced picture of American fashion, one in which the sum of its parts is as important as the whole."

A dress belonging to the former US first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, part of the exhibition 'In America: An Anthology of Fashion', at the Metropolitan Museum of New York held in May 2022.Charles Sykes (AP)

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