This week’s opening of the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute couldn’t be further from a sleepy fairy tale.
Visitors will pass through a series of 29 rooms where 16 “Sleeping Beauties” are encased in glass, garments too delicate to be hung on mannequins. While many of the 220 garments, accessories and buttons are dazzling, the overall experience – and that alone – is an assault on the senses and a new terrain for an exhibition – fashion or otherwise. Beyond the naked eye, ticket holders will put their senses to the test. There are four galleries filled with molecular scent recordings, four galleries amplifying sound recordings, four galleries with CGI and/or digital avatars, three galleries with poetry readings, two galleries encouraging “forbidden museum behavior” (touching objects), and a finale. Gallery featuring ChatGPT powered interaction created by Open AI.
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While the earliest known version of the “Sleeping Beauty” story dates back to 1330, The Met’s multi-sensory and digitally enhanced show is very much about the future. During a preview on Sunday afternoon, Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton said: “For me, this is just the beginning of my curatorial practice. “I like the idea of moving forward with this sensory and emotional approach to fashion.” He added that creating a sound and scent database for selected products will be part of the equation.
The goal of “Sleeping Beauties” is to “re-evoke through the senses” the costumes in the Costume Institute’s 33,000-piece collection “so you can actually smell them, touch them, hear them and, of course, see them,” Bolton said. Taking a participatory approach, visitors can run their palms across the “touch wall”, a 3D-printed plastic version of the embroidered pattern of Raf Simon’s 2013 “Miss Dior” dress for Dior. They can also feel the 3D replica pattern of Dior’s 2014 “Mini Miss Dior” dress up close and admire the vibrantly colored real version beneath a glass bell jar.
The prismatic effect is clearly visible throughout the exhibition, including at the exhibition entrance, where Brancusi’s 1910 bronze sculpture “The Sleeping Muse” stands. This face was the inspiration for the model wearing the 1930 Callot Soeurs wedding gown, which was the show’s final look. Perched atop an all-white amphitheater, the dress comes to life in other ways, too. With a quick QR scan, visitors will be able to interact with the dress’s former owner, Jazz Age socialite Natalie Potter, using ChatGPT. An 1869 cottonwood hand-held fan, written like a diary by a 19-year-old bride whom Bolton describes as a “honeymoon fan” detailing the three weeks after the wedding, adds another dimension.
From the beginning, the contrast between the ancient and the futuristic is clear. Take Charles Frederick Worth’s 1887 silk satin and chiffon “Cloud” dress, which had “warp loss” caused by distortion of the horizontal threads. Rather than masking these flaws, the lighting on the garment directs the eye to “the inherent weakness that causes it to disappear,” Bolton said. Opposite this is a redesigned version of the ball gown on a form that appears to dance like “Pepper’s ghost”; This is an illusion technique in which the image of an object offstage is projected so that it appears to be in front of the audience. This digital version took over six months and 40 different visualizations to create. (It’s fittingly accompanied by a musical score of Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”) The “reawakening,” so to speak, of the Worth dress is just a few steps away: the Fall 2017 Gucci cape designed by Alessandro Michele.
Bolton said technological influences are making the past more accessible in countless ways, from slides on the wall to more sophisticated artificial intelligence and CGI. “What people sometimes don’t understand is that once a garment enters a museum, it can no longer be touched, smelled, heard or worn, so you have to rely on sight. Since fashion is a living art, it depends on the body to activate it. Fashion is just waiting to be touched. It reflects many emotions, unlike a painting that is hung on the wall and just seen.”
The exhibition, which opens to the public on Wednesday and runs until September 2, features nature-focused themed courses, Painted Flowers, Blurred Flowers, and varying degrees of multi-sensory combinations in galleries that serve as case studies. , Dior’s Garden, Van Gogh’s Flowers, Poppies, Garthwaite’s Garden, Red Rose, Ghost of the Rose, Men’s Fragrance, Women’s Fragrance, Resada Luteola, Garden, Garden Life, Insects, Insect Wings, Butterflies, Birds, Nightingale and Rose, Sea Life, Venus, Shells, Siren, Snakes, Mermaid and Mermaid Bride.
Some of the more unexpected elements, particularly digital ones, were crafted and perfected by Showstudio’s Nick Knight, the exhibition’s creative consultant and who created the AI and CGI images, including a projection of a dying rose. Sometimes the scent becomes the main attraction, as in The Phantom of the Rose, which is based on the idea that perfume often remains embedded in a garment. Fragrance researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas used peak molecules from three dresses, including Paul Poiret’s 1913 “La Rose d’Iribe” dress, to transform scents into scented paint applied to three sections of a nearby wall that visitors could smear to smell each scent. . At another site, the intricate embroidery of a vest produced between 1615 and 1620 has been reimagined with an interactive embossed wallpaper made to the specifications of the Braille alphabet.
A symphony of scents can be conjured up at Scent of a Woman, which showcases numerous floral hats and a fall 1938 House of Schiaparelli blue silk crepe evening gown belonging to Millicent Rogers. Met-goers can use nearby plastic tubes to sniff out six peak molecules on the Standard Oil heir’s suit. “You actually smell Millicent Rogers,” Bolton said. “You smell not only the scent he uses, but also his natural body odors, what he eats, what he smokes, what he smokes, and where he lives.” All of these scents are released by Tolaas.
Mortality is hinted at in the Poppies area, where actor Morgan Specter is heard reading John McRae’s 1915 poem “In Flanders Field,” saluting World War I soldiers who died on the Western Front. The Ana de Pombe evening dress from 1937 has a poppy pattern that reminds of drops of blood. Nearby, noteworthy is the Spring 2015 Viktor & Rolf haute couture laser-cut poppy-inspired suit, whose headpiece consists of wicker and carbon fiber rods.
Horror also seeps into the painting, particularly in The Birds gallery, which features two orange Alexander McQueen jackets, including a spring 1995 model jacket with a screen print by Simon Ungless and Andrew Groves, while hand-painted swallows are displayed on a fall 1938 Madeleine Vionnet evening gown. with swallow pattern. What stands out is the large-scale film projection of a flock of swallows increasingly filling the sky. Updated footage of birds flapping their wings can be heard on the soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller “The Birds.” Iris van Herpen’s fall 2011 “Snake” dress was set against a Knight-made image of snakes crawling, so the snakes might spook some attendees.
Van Gogh’s Flowers is not to be missed, as is the display of Yves Saint Laurent’s “Irises” jacket, inspired by the Impressionist’s 1889 painting of the same name. A rotating projection overhead zooms in on the boldness and intricacies of the garment’s embroidery. Workers at Maison Lesage needed 600 hours of manual labor, 200,000 beads and 150,000 sequins in 22 colors to complete the garment.
“Sleeping Beauties” also features green shots of major talent; These include one of Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson’s coats, which are literally still growing in a glass case, sprouting on grass. Before installation, the Costume Institute team tended to the seed-covered fur in a watered grow tent. A time-lapse video of this device serves as the background. But after a week of showing, the suit will need to be replaced with a dry version for the duration of the show.
Anderson and TikTok CEO Shou Chew will serve as honorary chairmen at the Met Gala on Monday night. TikTok is the main sponsor of the exhibition, with support from Loewe and additional support from Conde Nast. When asked about the TikTok factor given the US ban on the social media platform, Bolton said: “When we approached TikTok it was very exciting for us because it’s such a huge platform. Obviously it’s about technology. Hopefully our shows reach a huge audience. That’s our goal.” “It was and still is really exciting for us.”
Asked about concerns about this election being overturned, Bolton said: “We’ll have to see how things develop.” [with the issue of a U.S. ban.”
Nature is meant to be seen as “the ultimate metaphor for fashion,” and one that relays a message of rebirth and renewal, Bolton said, “We also wanted to use this as an opportunity to engage with designers, who are involved more deeply in ethical, sustainable practices and acquire pieces from them.”
Other environmentally enterprising creations are Conner Ives’ “Couture Girl” dress from the designer’s 2020 graduate collection entitled “the American Dream.” The bulbous creation was made from dead-stock fabric donated by Carolina Herrera’s creative director Wes Gordon and was made with paillettes made from recycled PET by the Sustainable Sequin Co. Ives hand embroidered 10,000-plus sequins basing the shapes on his four favorite flowers. In “The Mermaid” area of the show, there is Phillip Lim’s 2021 “Algae Sequin” dress, which is made of biodegradable rayon mesh derived from bamboo and seaweed. Sustainability and the ethics of fashion should be seen as part of fashion and not designated in a special section, nor be unjustly criticized for its aesthetic, Bolton said.
In the “Seashells” area, visitors will not only see Alexander McQueen’s spring 2001 dress made from razor clamshells but they will hear what it sounds like in motion. A recording was made in an anechoic chamber. There are also other sea-worthy creations so to speak, like an Iris van Herpen’s 3D printed haute couture ensemble with spiraling shell forms, as well as a row of shell-shaped handbags by Judith Leiber.
Considering the breadth of “Sleeping Beauties” and the depth of details, it’s not surprising that the show’s layout was designed to look like a molecular formula if seen from above. Given the technology and fashion combination, Bolton said, “In a way, it’s like marrying the poetics of fashion with the poetics of science.”
The Met Previews “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”
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Launch Gallery: The Met Previews “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”
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