The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City has officially announced the theme for the 2020 gala. In the upcoming year, the theme for the gala is named “About Time: Fashion and Duration” and it aims to inspire the audiences to analyse how fashion has developed as well as changed over the years.

The exhibition is also going to be a part of Met’s 150th-anniversary celebration. It will feature the history of fashion from 1870 to the present. It will be partly inspired by Virginia Woolf and the theories of the early-20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson.

“It not only reflects and represents the spirit of the times, but it also changes and develops with the times serving as an especially sensitive and accurate timepiece. Through a series of chronologies, the exhibition will use the concept of duration to analyze the temporal twists and turns of fashion history,” said Andrew Bolton to The New York Times.

The gala will be held on the evening of May 4, the first Monday of May. The exhibition will run from May 7 to September 7. The exhibition will feature 160 pieces of women’s clothing from the past 150 years.

“This exhibition will consider the ephemeral nature of fashion, employing flashbacks and fast-forwards to reveal how it can be both linear and cyclical,” Max Hollein, director of the Met, said in a statement. “As such, the show will present a nuanced continuum of fashion over the Museum’s 150-year history,” as reported by CNN. 

Along with the theme revelation, they also announced the co-chairs for the annual invite-only gala: Actresses Emma Stone and Meryl Streep, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton along with Anna Wintour.

In 2019, the Met Gala theme was Camp and we saw celebrities such as Jared Leto and Ezra Miller pull off the theme with their outrageously accurate outfits. It will be interesting to see how celebrities and fashion icons stick to 2020’s broad theme and do justice to the many eras of fashion gone by.