“…to sleep, perchance to dream…”
In its focus on sensory immersion and participatory elements, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”—the Costume Institute’s new show, opening to the public on May 10, after the 2024 Met Gala tonight—moves toward breaking the fourth wall. This is achieved physically by the limited use of glass cases, and in other more intangible ways. It could be argued that Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge, and his team are attempting to create a kind of synesthesia (a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second one) through smell, sound, and sight.
In person, and in the catalog, Bolton relates an anecdote about a young visitor to last year’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition asking the guard why she couldn’t touch anything, which is an almost instinctual action around clothing. Touch is of primary importance to wearers and designers alike, yet it is a sense denied in museums for the protection of the objects which they hold in trust for perpetuity. (Exposure to certain light levels and skin oils are two factors that contribute to the decomposition of fabric.) Physical touch remains elusive in “Sleeping Beauties,” but the idea of it, Bolton notes, is very much alive. The exhibition, he says “makes you realize that actually your sense of sight is a way of touching…touching your feelings, touching your emotion, touching your memory. It’s always been a little bit frustrating when a garment comes into the museum and the only sense you are really left with is sight…you can focus on the construction, the technique, the embroidery. But I think by activating these other senses, you also realize that sight is much more complex than just looking at something.”
To enter the exhibition is to cross a border into another realm—maybe the Land of Nod. The first thing the visitor’s eye falls on is Constantin Brancusi’s ovid bronze, The Sleeping Muse of 1910, a solid take on an altered state of being where dreams exist. This sculpture is worth taking some time over, as it suggests multiple readings. To start, it might be understood as an opening salvo meant to have resonance on an institutional level. More than 100 years after Brancusi made this piece, costume departments are still justifying their existence in museum contexts and in the hierarchy of the arts. It might also speak to the cerebral nature of Bolton’s approach to fashion.
The frameworks of his Costume Institute exhibitions are always multilayered, and “Sleeping Beauties,” is no exception. On one level, the exhibition theme, nature, is straightforward. Objects from the collection are organized into groups relating to three elements: Earth, Air, and Water, each with multiple sub-divisions, such as poppies and daisies, shells and mermaids. Adding nuance is the symbolism of nature, which is, as Bolton writes, “the ultimate metaphor for fashion, in its rebirth, renewal, and cyclicity; nature also serves as a metaphor for fashion’s transience and impermanence and its ephemerality and evanescence.”
In the past several years the curatorial staff has been exploring the Costume Institute’s collection in new ways. The two-part “In America” exhibitions started to tell sometimes difficult stories about previously unexplored makers. “Sleeping Beauties” asks how science can safely extract hitherto untapped sensory aspects of garments.
Fashion has historically been slow to adapt to technology (I can attest that Style.com was a hard sell for some back in the day, having worked at the site near its inception). The Costume Institute is now embracing it for the purpose of further engaging a digital savvy audience. “As a curator,” said Bolton, “you’re always thinking, as well as including the artistic and the aesthetic and the cultural and historical, what else can we do?”
Dye analyses were one type of experiment undertaken by the curators in the making of this exhibition. An examination of a Delphos dress by Mario Fortuny revealed the use of artificial colors, disproving the long-held assumption that he used natural processes. The sound playing in the room in which a sonorous frock with tin flowers from Marni’s fall 2024 collection is shown, was recorded in an anechoic (echo-free) chamber at SUNY’s Binghamton University. There are a few things happening in the Dior room. There is a miniature Miss Dior dress from 2014 that was remade for “Sleeping Beauties” and a 3-D printed plastic model of it has been made to be touched. Also in the room is Raf Simons’s real-life size interpretation of the Miss Dior model. The walls of that room are tiled in urethane panels that were cast from that second Christian Dior dress, and can also be felt with the hands as can a dimensional tone-on-tone wallpaper in the Garden Life room inspired by the 17th-century embroidered waistcoat on view there.
Sissel Tolaas, a frequent collaborator of Demna’s at Balenciaga, is responsible for capturing scent scapes of several dresses and of specific women. Denise Poiret, the wife and muse Paul “King of Fashion” Poiret, who drew the rose on the maison’s label, is one of them. Another is the heiress and paradigm of chic Millicent Rogers; the traces of scent left on her Schiaparelli dress have also been documented and are available for the visitor to sniff.
The denouement of the show is the 1931 Callot Soeurs-designed wedding dress of the socialite Natalie Potter, featuring a scalloped cathedral train that rolls down a platform like an incoming tide. A customized version of ChatGPT has been employed to allow visitors to ask questions of this “mermaid bride.”
Once accessioned (accepted into a museum collection), garments are forever severed from their connection to the body for which they were designed and which complete them. Curators and conservators are always having to decide whether public display outweighs the risk of an object’s longevity or not. In this exhibition the term “sleeping beauties” refers not to Disney’s slumbering princess who is kissed awake by a dashing prince, but to objects too fragile even to be dressed on a mannequin and which are displayed flat in a resting position. “Life is the key word in relation to fashion in a museum,” writes Bolton in his catalog introduction, “for what was once a vital and integral part of a person’s lived experience becomes a lifeless, disembodied, and decontextualized art work. Indeed, more than any other form of artistic expression, fashion encounters the most radical and irrevocable transformation in status upon entering a museum’s collection.”
Though this was not necessarily conscious on the curator’s part, the way I see it, “Sleeping Beauties,” is one of a series of exhibitions in which Bolton and team have explored the life of fashion outside of the physical; the ways that clothing, a kind of second skin, affects us in intangible ways. “About Time: Fashion and Duration” (2020) introduced the topics of simultaneity of time (past and present), which connects with the theme of reawakening or resurrection in “Sleeping Beauties.” The new show also seems to build upon 2016’s “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” The focus this time, however, shifts from the role of technology in the making of garments to the deciphering and creative communication of their hidden attributes. Bolton argued for broader, emotional readings of home-grown design in “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion;” this year’s focus is on better using the senses to engage with fashion. Part of the push for this approach, he writes, is “facilitating accessibility to and full-bodied experiences for visitors with disabilities.”
“Sleeping Beauties” expands our sensory experience of fashion within a museum context at a time when (pop) culture as a whole is leaning into the idea of “experiences.” Making museology (particularly conservation) a subtheme of the show seems topical in light of the debate over the wearing of the 1962 “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress designed by Bob Mackie and Jean Louis for Marilyn Monroe. The role of science is worked in obvious and subtle ways throughout. The exhibition’s rooms and passages are like those of a connecting molecule. The idea, Bolton explained, “is that when you are in a space, you have a very intimate connection with the objects, but also it would contain the sense—and it could be sight, it could be sound, or smell, it’s often a mixture of all of those—and move from one to the next.” Multimedia activations, overseen by Creative Consultant Nick Knight and realized by SHOWstudio, also conjure emotions apart from those evoked by the garments; crashing waves are seen and heard in a video in the water section; similarly a video of black snakes slithering is installed in the earth section.
“The sensorial and the emotional are so much part of clothing in our experience and notions of feelings and memory,” mused Bolton on a walk-through. “We’ve reawakened garments in the past, mainly through interpretation—never really through the senses. This is the first time we’re literally bringing them back to life.”
