Discover the Met's Costume Institute Collection
Discover the Future of Fashion
Discover Fashion Week
Compare Dress Across Cultures
Discover the Origins of What You Wear
Discover Fashion Down the Ages
Metropolitan Museum Partners with Berg Fashion Library
Berg is proud to announce its partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to enable more than two thousand images from the internationally renowned Costume Institute’s collection to be made available through the Berg Fashion Library.
Intelligent Textiles
Bradley Quinn explores the future of fashion, from illuminating textiles to wearable technology – such as Chalayan’s mechanical dresses, powered by machine-driven levers that open and close to change the dress’s silhouette. The distinction between body and technology, natural and artificial, looks increasingly blurred.
London and New York
September sees two key events in the fashion calendar: New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week. Read about the role of these and other fashion weeks as crucial opportunities for journalists, buyers, exhibitors, customers and celebrities to get together for a few hectic days and celebrate fashion.
The Sari and the Kimono: Opposite or Alike?
The sari and the kimono are traditionally viewed as opposed, one draping over the body while the other binds it. This has been read in the context of Western dress history, which links tight-fitting garments with cultural constriction and loose, flowing garments with liberation. However, this disregards the shared qualities of both garments which in fact unite them.
The Bikini: Not Worn by Marshall Islanders
The Berg Fashion Library helps you discover the history and meaning of iconic items of dress, from jeans to the sari. For example, the bikini was deliberately named after the atoll where the US had exploded an atomic bomb, but its association with the island is offensive to Marshallese people and is quite contrary to the modesty of local dress customs.
What were we wearing 20, 50, 100 years ago?
Take a trip through dress history with the Berg Fashion Library, from eighteenth-century petticoats to Dior's post-war New Look, through Dynasty-style shoulder pads of the 1980s, right up to catwalk creations from Autumn/Fall 2009.
Subscribers can use the Browse or Explore by Time features to research their favourite style period.
