This topsy-turvy notion of time plays out in the masterworks from the Met’s collection that Bolton has curated. The exhibition, which celebrates the museum’s 150th anniversary, operates with two timelines of entirely black garments and is ghost-narrated by Virginia Woolf, whose Orlando serves as the spiritual backbone of the exhibition. The first timeline is a linear one from 1870 to 2020 that Bolton describes as Baudelarian, stressing ideas of fashion’s “ephemerality, obsolescence, and progress.” The second narrative is that of the “disruptions,” garments placed just behind those in the linear timeline that draw parallels in silhouette, material, and philosophy across eras.

The first coupling of the show is a bustled mourning dress from the 1870s set beside a curvaceous Elsa Schiaparelli evening dress from 1939. Then comes a princess dress with a dropped waist and darted torso inspired by the style of Princess Alexandra of Denmark beside Alexander McQueen’s famous bumster skirt, both garments emphasizing an ultralong torso through radically different means. The pairings play out like this in the exhibition’s darkened first gallery: Chanel LBDs with Norman Norell’s and Virgil Abloh’s clever send-ups, and Jeanne Lanvin’s big pannier hips beside Jonathan Anderson’s for Loewe right up until 1957, where a wasp-waisted Hubert de Givenchy strapless dress with floral embroideries is set beside Raf Simons’s 2013 take on the silhouette for Dior. Turn a corner after that duo, though, and time explodes.

Fashion’s frenetic and chaotic history from the 1960s to the present comes to light in this second gallery, reflected and folding back over itself. The legible deflating and reflating of silhouette that defined the 1870-to-1950s timeline is replaced here by a veritable grab bag of styles. Bolton refers to the narrative of this gallery as “achronological, fragmented, nonlinear.” The proof is in the looks chosen to represent the year 1994: Gianni Versace’s infamous and revealing safety-pin dress, a curve-hugging paneled knit by Azzedine Alaïa, Issey Miyake’s plissé “flying-saucer dress” with cartoonish parabolic curves, a sheer Vivienne Westwood dress that reveals padded underpinnings, and a delicious bias-draped slip by John Galliano. They’re all body conscious in their own way but do not reflect the unity of a single shape the way Dior’s New Look, say, defined the fit-and-flare look of its era.

“I think that time is almost stopping because of the accelerated pace of life,” Bolton says. “The acceleration of time is affecting the production of fashion, the circulation of fashion, the consumption of fashion. That is what we’re grappling with at the moment. How do we slow that down?”