As we wait with our breath held to get our hands on any details surrounding 2024’s Met Ball, the Costume Institute has announced a brand new fashion exhibition to keep us satiated. Sharing the news via Instagram, the NY landmark will pay tribute to women-led fashion houses and the pioneering designers at their helm.
Launching in December, Women Dressing Women will celebrate the history of women in fashion, starting from the early 20th century and running right through to today, via a group of 80 objects dug out from its permanent collection. Featuring both widely-celebrated and lesser-known designers and fashion houses – from Miuccia Prada and Vivienne Westwood, to Simone Rocha and Collina Strada – the exhibition will follow women’s social progress as charted through fashion.
“Our fall exhibition will provide an opportunity to engage with the critical histories of innovative women designers, all of whom played pivotal roles in the conception of fashion as we know it today,” the Costume Institute’s associate curator Mellissa Huber, who is leading the exhibition, explained in a press release. “In recognising that the contributions of women to fashion are unquantifiable, our intention with this show is to celebrate and acknowledge through a focus on The Costume Institute’s permanent collection, which represents a rich timeline of Western fashion history.”
She added: “We hope that this exhibition will foster impactful conversations between our visitors and across the designers’ larger bodies of work, highlighting the plurality and diversity of women’s important contributions to the field.”
While showcasing these innovations, the Met hopes to spotlight how generations of professional women have expanded upon the legacies of those who came before them, noted Karen Van Godtsenhoven, the exhibition’s guest curator. “By reflecting on the intergenerational dialogues between these designers and the talented women who worked alongside them, we aim to offer a contemporary point of view, further propelling the conversation between audiences and scholars,” she says.
Also on the line-up – which will chronologically map out designers’ contributions to fashion from 1910 to 2022 – will be Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, Anifa Mvuemba, Vivienne Westwood, Miuccia Prada, Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour, Yeohlee Teng, Simone Rocha, Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo, Ann Demeulemeester, and more.
Revisit the AW23 Simone Rocha show in the gallery above.