.png)
To celebrate its 150th anniversary the Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a series of exhibitions (including virtual ones) that tell its own story, or perhaps it would be better to say the many stories contained by this prestigious New York cultural institution. Among these, we found the one organized by the Costume Institute, the museum's department dedicated to fashion and textiles, particularly noteworthy. It is titlrs entitled About Time: Fashion and Duration.
May be it not a chance that the theme of durability, chosen by the museum, it is a key one to interpreting the historical moment we are living in. Today we all find ourselves thinking about time, re-evaluating our past habits to set our new future, or to get ready for a new normal. We are living the moment of time, which, as per Henri Bergson's philosophy is made of sets of moments which we can't never really own, if not in our memory.
Time is change, but it is a cyclical change: it ages and returns in the form of revivals and new fascinations. The Metropolitan's exhibition presents fashion evolution from 1870 to the present day: at the moment a minimalist black and white video shows pairs of garments that despite the distance in time reveal surprising similarities. But the concept of durability is even more appropriate when we talk about our beloved furniture: after its creation an object is immediately put to the test of time, its patina loses its shine, it depreciates or gets wasted with use. Yet there are pieces that despite the change in history return more contemporary than before just as if they had gone round the clock.
Today's consumer lives the continuous tension between the desire for sustainability and choosing an object that lasts over time, and the obsolete need to own a new garment or consumer item. In fashion, as in furnishig, there is a sense of dislocation created by the need to always have to predict what will happen tomorrow.
In a way the exhibition conceived by the curators of the Metropolitan Museum has managed to predict the future: it's time to go back to time! "It is about time" to choose our objects according to our personal taste and focus on durable designs and materials. IntOndo is trying to help by selecting, enhancing and presenting objects that last over time, this is the real meaning of "vintage" for us.
