The title’s nod to the fairy tale is actually a reference to the glass coffins – “let’s be more optimistic and call them display cases,” jokes curator Andrew Bolton – which contain 16 antique garments so fragile, they cannot be displayed in position. vertical. These delicate creatures have been sleeping, like Aurora herself, in the museum’s climate-controlled archives.
But these beauties are a small fraction of the 220 objects on display at Sleeping Beautiesa nature-themed exhibition, which Bolton calls one of the institute’s most ambitious exhibitions yet (its previous blockbusters include Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty y China: Through the Looking Glass). It is also special to Bolton because all the items on display are from the museum’s own collection.
Another key difference: this exhibition will be a multi-sensory experience, involving not only sight, but also smell, hearing and touch. Organized around themes of land, air and water, it includes the work of a olfactory artist who extracted and analyzed molecules from clothing, creating aromas that visitors can smell in plastic tubes. The curators have also captured fabric sounds in an echo-free chamber and used 3D scans to replicate embroidery patterns for touch.
“Despite the scale, I really wanted this to be intimate and participatory,” Bolton said during a weekend tour of the exhibition. In fact, there’s even a mannequin wearing a dress that you can text a question to, and it will give you an answer with the help of ChatGPT.
The golden age
A satin and chiffon ball gown from the late 19th century begins the exhibition, with its intricate embroidery of metallic threads, gold beads and sequins that evoke the sun’s rays radiating from the clouds. But influential English designer Charles Frederick Worth’s Cloud Dress is doomed, due to the deterioration of the vertical threads: “there’s nothing we can do about it,” says Bolton.
Except perhaps to recreate it digitally: On a nearby screen, an animated illusion of Pepper’s ghost that took nine months to perfect shows the dress dancing. The dress was donated by relatives of Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, played in The Gilded Age of HBO by Donna Murphy.
silk taffeta sound
A trio of dresses from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries explores the look of blurred flowers, the effect that makes a dress look like a watercolor or an impressionist work.
But in this gallery you can also hear silk taffeta rustling. The sound was captured in an echo-free chamber at Binghamton University. In another gallery, the clatter of razor-shaped shells, captured in the same way, can be heard accompanying McQueen’s dramatic “razor” dress, covered in dried, bleached shells.
From Dior to Adore
Christian Dior was inspired by the Impressionist painters, and nowhere is this more evident than in the delicate floral embroidery on Miss Dior’s famous dress, on display is a miniature version of the original.
It looks like an elegant bouquet of flowers, and if you’re dying to touch it, there’s a small white replica in 3D-printed plastic. You can also run your hands through wallpaper, created to match the shape of the flowers in Raf Simons’ avant-garde 2013 version of the black dress, with leather flowers.
Embroidery
In 1988, Yves Saint Laurent paid homage to Van Gogh’s famous depiction of lilies from a hundred years earlier, with a brilliant jacket celebrated for its embroidery.
The museum shows it flat to give a closer view of a garment that required 600 hours of work by artisans who used 250 meters of ribbon, 200,000 beads and 250,000 sequins in 22 colors.
The Rose
In a show dedicated to nature, it is not unusual to find rooms dedicated to roses. And you are invited to smell them, through aromas captured in plastic tubes, not only the smell of the roses, but that of the clothes themselves and those who wore them. Bolton explains that Norwegian ‘smell artist’ Sissel Tolaas brought a device that extracted molecules from 57 clothes.
Two evening dresses, one by Saint Laurent for Dior and another for Lanvin, produced molecules found in things like almonds, honey, tobacco and hay, and even: “a mild sexual attractant for moths and cockroaches.”
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”
AP/Julia Nikhinson
Women perfume
It’s not Al Pacino’s movie, here it’s a gallery dedicated to Millicent Rogers, a socialite, heiress and art collector known for her style and her way of combining haute couture with regional clothing.
However, this gallery focuses on her scent, analyzing the molecules of her clothes, such as a 1938 Schiaparelli evening dress in blue silk crepe, to discover her fragrances, but also her habits and lifestyle: “including that he ate, drank and smoked.
A living shelter
One of the main attractions of the Garden Life section is a layer of grass in which wool has been planted, as if it were soil, with oats, rye and wheat grass.
At this moment, the design of the honorary president of the gala, Jonathan Anderson, from the brand Loewe (sponsor of the show) looks beautiful and green. But it is dying, because this version cannot be watered, and will be replaced about a week after opening by a different version.
There are also plenty of floral hats from the Met’s copious collection. These have also been analyzed for odors, creating fragrances that contain hairspray, as you would expect, but also chewing gum, cigarettes and other things.
Don’t feed the birds!
Bolton has said he wants to depict not only nature, but also the nuances of emotion, including fear. Which is just what you can feel when you come to a section of flying beings: insects and beetle wings, for example, also birds.
It is said that McQueen adored Birds by Alfred Hitchcock, and here we have his orange wool jacket printed with black swallows. The creepy part is an animation on the ceiling: first a few black birds, then more, then so many that the space turns an ominous black. The animation, created with the advice of wildlife experts, comprises 14,000 digital swallows, ending with 4,000 simulated feathers. For sound, swallows were recorded, and the buzzing sound from the 1963 film was also captured to create tension.
Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion It opens to the public on Friday and will run until September 2.
Source: AP
