exhibits Jeny Howorth - Lulu Serena Morton Jeny Howorth’s works of art are like time capsules. They hark back to a time when young people read and collected all sorts of magazines, ripped out the pictures and stuck them on to bedroom or study walls. Appropriating artwork, collecting and listening to music was a shared generational activity much as social media is today. Howorth’s artistic North London upbringing provided early exposure to what was happening in British culture and she was encouraged to be creative. Later through her career she was surrounded by art directors, fashion editors and photographers and within this likeminded group achieved recognition as one of the most successful British supermodels of her generation. Alongside her professional work, Howorth was obsessively collecting images from books and magazines and she started to build the montages which capture her life, loves and influences. The examples of collage, viewed in museum exhibitions, was appropriated into British pop art making and was a contemporary visual language. Pasting up your choices you freely join a tribe. It was an agreeable pastime for an internet-free youth who unwittingly would leap from an industrial world to electronic future, when house music exploded upon the night club scene. Howorth has taken that memory base and the behavior of a generation and immortalized it into these iconic, splendidly boxed collage works. About Time: Fashion and Duration Metropolitan Museum of Art The latest exhibit at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art explores fashion’s reputation and reinvention at is relates to time. The show had been delayed for months by the pandemic, and that time was used, in part, to tweak its presentation on account the Black Lives Matter movement.
Normally the city’s social event of the year, 2020’s Met Gala organized by Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour -which usually opens the costume exhibit -- was cancelled, like every major indoor gathering since midMarch. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Met, Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Costume Institute, aimed to highlight the museum’s own collection that includes 33,000 pieces of clothing and accessories. “When I began working on the show, it started off as this sort of meditation on
Ketchup Kate, 2018; Collage 80 x 80 cm.
Time,” which will run until February 7. However, Bolton did not want to focus on chronology, instead presenting concepts in pairs -- two pieces, two parallel time periods with similar aesthetics, for a 124-piece show featuring a single gown to close. “By having past and present coexist together, it sort of takes you outside of the confine of chronology and makes you think about time very differently,” Bolton said. Fashion is on display during the press preview for the The Costume Institute’s exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration” on October 26, 2020, which will be on view from October 29, 2020 to February 7, 2021 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show traces 150 years of fashion, from 1870 to the present, along a disrupted timeline, in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP.
fashion and temporality,” he told a press preview of the exhibit entitled “About
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The concept of the exhibit creates an ongoing dialogue between older pieces from the 1870s when the Met was founded and more recent items from the 1960s and beyond. For example, elements that were popular in 1870s-era wardrobes are seen again in the work of modern designers considered particularly innovative, including Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, and John Galliano.
