Garments acquired during the past seven years — from a 1730s English man's suit of red wool lavishly embroidered with gilt paillettes to a 2005 John Galliano for Christian Dior deconstructed ball gown — will be presented in chronological order to stimulate debate about the vicissitudes of fashion.
Acquisitions of note come from such houses as Adrian, Azzedine Alaïa, Miguel Adrover, Geoffrey Beene, Manolo Blahnik, Hussein Chalayan, Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel, Comme des Garçons, Simon Costin, Christian Dior, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Rudi Gernreich, Michele Oka Doner and Nancy Gonzalez, Odile Gilbert, Madame Grès, Charles James, Donna Karan, Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Hamish Morrow, Paul Poiret, Rodarte, Yves Saint Laurent, Elsa Schiaparelli, Tao, Yeohlee Teng, Olivier Theyskens for Nina Ricci, Junya Watanabe, Vivienne Westwood, Charles Frederick Worth, and Yohji Yamamoto.
Notable objects include a Miguel Adrover ensemble from 2001 made from Quentin Crisp's old mattress, which Adrover found discarded outside the writer's Lower East Side apartment. A fashionable aristocrat's opulently beaded dress from 1910, at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — which the Museum purchased in 2003 from a London auction house — was later discovered by The Costume Institute's conservator to have a 24-carat-gold lining inside each bead.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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