The first Monday in May in fashion has become traditionally linked with the Met Gala, the event that kicks off the yearly Costume Institute exhibition.
This year the exhibition is going to be dedicated to the time and fashion connection, but, because of the Coronavirus emergency, the Gala was suspended (but, to get in the mood, you can rewatch Andrew Rossi's 2016 documentary The First Monday in May, on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, and iTunes - May's proceeds of sales and rentals will go to the Met Museum and to A Common Thread, a joint initiative by Vogue and the CFDA to help people working in the fashion industry affected by the pandemic). The exhibition has also been rescheduled to later on this year (October 29, 2020 - February 7, 2021, if the reason why the event is being delayed hadn't been so tragic, you could have argued that having an exhibition about time postponed is rather paradoxical and surreal...).
"About Time: Fashion and Duration" will look at fashion from 1870 (the year of The Met's founding but also a pivotal year that marked new developments) to the present, juxtaposing 120 designs, and with the ghost of Virginia Woolf as narrative voice.
For the occasion, galleries will be turned into clock faces, and designs will be displayed according to a 60-minute principle. Each "minute" will be dedicated to a pair of designs from different times that show some connections (shape, motif, material, pattern, technique and so on) and with one garment in black and another in black or white to highlight associations and differences.
But the history of fashion and design also features jewellery and accessories that fall into the "time" category. Among them there is for example Salvador Dalí's "The Eye of Time" brooch.
After a first collaboration with jewellery designer Fulco di Verdura (who was more famous for his work with Coco Chanel), in 1949 Dalí signed a contract with New York-based Argentinian jewellery manufacturer Carlos Alemany to make his own collection.
Originally made by Alemany & Ertman in 1949 for Dalí's wife Gala and part of a collection that featured 39 pieces, "The Eye of Time" consisted in a diamond and platinum blue eye brooch with a ruby at the lacrimal sac and a teardrop pendant. The eyeball integrated a watch with a dial hand-painted and signed by Dalí.
Clocks - and in particular surreally melting ones that could morph from solid objects to a liquid form - were among Dalí's favourite symbols. The artist often used them to represent a metaphysical image of time, a concept we have maybe become accustomed with during the Coronavirus lockdown, a period in which time dilated, or we simply lost track of it.
Integrating a watch in the eye brooch may have been a way for the artist to humorously refer to expressions such as "in a blink of time" or "in the blink of an eye", but maybe Dalí was just interested in creating something unusual and surreal. In the volume Dalí, A Study of his Art-in-Jewels, the artist highlighted indeed how his jewels were not conceived as cold objects that could "rest soullessly in steel vaults", but they were arty pieces made to "please the eye, uplift the spirit, stir the imagination, express convictions."
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