The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that the theme for the Costume Institute’s Spring 2016 will center around technology’s influence on fashion.
The Met exhibit is titled manus x machina: fashion in an age of technology and will display the impact of new technology on design, and the handmade articles of clothing versus machine made ones. In partnership with Apple the Robert Lehman wing and Anna Wintour Costume Center will allow visitors to explore this development with handmade and machine made garments placed side by side, and a workshop station displaying a 3D printer creating clothing.
In celebration, the Met’s Costume Institute Benefit, or Met Gala, will take place on May 2 of next year.The evening’s co-chairs will be Idris Elba, Jonathan Ive, Taylor Swift, and Anna Wintour. Nicolas Ghesquière, Karl Lagerfeld, and Miuccia Prada will serve as Honorary Chairs. The exhibit will be open to the public on May 5 to August 14, 2016.
Instead of a look into the past, which the themes of previous exhibit’s have mostly been focused on including last years China Through the Looking Glass and Charles James: Beyond Fashion, this exhibit deals heavily in the present and future.”Traditionally, the distinction between the haute couture and prêt-à-porter was based on the handmade and the machine-made, but recently this distinction has become increasingly blurred as both disciplines have embraced the practices and techniques of the other,” Andrew Bolton, Curator in The Costume Institute said in a statement. “manus x machina will challenge the conventions of the hand/machine dichotomy, and propose a new paradigm germane to our age of digital technology.”
