The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just added a little more time to see “Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology.” Six hours, to be exact.

“Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum.
“Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. © Jake Naughton for The New York Times

On Sept. 2 and 3, during the exhibition’s final weekend, the Met will keep its doors open until midnight, an extra three hours. The museum’s other galleries will be closed, but the exhibition, the Great Hall Balcony Bar — and the “Manus x Machina” exhibition shop,1 of course — will be open for business.

This adds to the already prolonged farewell to the show, which explores the convergence of couture and technology and was originally slated to close on Aug. 14.

  • 1. The Costume Institute's spring 2016 exhibition explores how fashion designers are reconciling the handmade and the machine-made in the creation of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear.

    With more than 170 ensembles dating from the early 20th century to the present, the exhibition addresses the founding of the haute couture in the 19th century, when the sewing machine was invented, and the emergence of a distinction between the hand (manus) and the machine (machina) at the onset of mass production. It explores this ongoing dichotomy, in which hand and machine are presented as discordant tools in the creative process, and questions the relationship and distinction between haute couture and ready-to-wear.

    The Robert Lehman Wing galleries, on the Museum's first floor and ground level, have been transformed into a building-within-a-building using white scrims. The space houses a series of case studies in which haute couture and ready-to-wear ensembles are decoded to reveal their hand/machine DNA. A 2014 haute couture wedding dress by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel with a 20-foot train occupies a central cocoon, with details of its embroidery projected onto the domed ceiling. The scuba knit ensemble, one of the inspirations for the exhibition, stands as a superlative example of the confluence between the handmade and the machine-made–the pattern on the train was hand-painted with gold metallic pigment, machine-printed with rhinestones, and hand-embroidered with pearls and gemstones.