Met Extends Show on China’s Fashion Influence

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An haute-couture creation from Givenchy made of black silk taffeta embroidered with black glass beads and crystals.Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “China: Through the Looking Glass,” an exploration of China’s influence on Western fashion and the largest show ever organized by the museum’s Costume Institute, has proven so popular that it will be extended three weeks, through Labor Day, Sept. 7, museum officials said Tuesday.

The show has drawn more than 350,000 visitors since opening on May 7, and it is on pace to end its run in the rarified territory occupied by the museum’s 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibition, which drew 661,000 visitors over three months and was extended a week to accommodate the crowds. (The McQueen show was the most-visited exhibition for the Costume Institute since it became a part of the museum in 1946, and the show was the eighth most popular in the museum’s history.)

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Examples of calligraphy on 1950s dresses by Chanel, left, and Dior.Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“China: Through the Looking Glass,” organized by the Costume Institute in collaboration with the Department of Asian Art, has not occasioned the hours-long lines of the McQueen show, but only because it encompasses space that is three times as large as the typical spring Costume Institute show – in the museum’s Chinese and Egyptian galleries as well as that of the Anna Wintour Costume Center. “This exhibition is one of the most ambitious ever mounted by the Met,” Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director and chief executive, said in a statement. “And I want as many people as possible to be able see it.”

The museum said that visitors from China, who already make up the largest segment of the Met’s international audience, are coming in great numbers to see the show, and that Chinese tour operators have doubled the number of tickets they originally planned to buy.