Fashion, surely most would agree, is meant to be seen. Not heard, and certainly not smelled. But Andrew Bolton, the curatorial mastermind behind the blockbuster fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, has a different take. His latest show, which will be launched by the star-studded Met Gala next month, seeks to provide a multi-sensory experience, involving not only the eyes but also the nose, ears – and even the tips of the fingers, which There is a traditional taboo in a museum.
Open to the public through May 10, “Sleeping Beauties: Rewalking Fashion” features 250 items that are being revived from years of slumber in the institute’s vast collection, some of which are in such a fragile state that they can’t even be kept unwrapped May go. Shown in effigy or erect. These clothes will lie in glass coffins – yes, like Sleeping Beauty.
As always, celebrity guests will get a first look at the exhibit at the May 6 gala, which this year is being hosted by Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny and Chris Hemsworth. With a dress code defined as “The Garden of Time”, one can expect lots of creative, garden-themed riffs. But would anyone really go to such lengths to wear a living garden? As he launched the exhibit last weekend, Bolton shared that there’s one such garment in the show, a coat impregnated with oats, rye and wheatgrass.
The garment, designed by Jonathan Anderson of the label LOEWE (sponsor of the show), is currently “growing” with its own irrigation system in a tent at the museum. It will be displayed in its full green glory for the first week, after which it will be replaced with a version, also grown for the show, which has been dried. As the museum says, the coat “will grow and die during the exhibition.”
“Sleeping Beauties” will be organized around the themes of earth, air and water — but also around the different senses, says Bolton. The garden gallery where the coat will be displayed is one of four areas dedicated to the sense of smell.
This means viewers will be able to sample scents associated with different apparel. But that doesn’t mean that a floral gown, for example, will be accompanied by a floral scent. The reality is much more complex.
“We’re really presenting the olfactory history of the garment,” says Bolton. , For these galleries, the museum worked with Norwegian “scent artist” Sissel Tolas, who took 57 “molecular readings” of the fabrics to create all the scents that would flow through the rooms and accompany visitors with the objects on display. Will enhance the relationship.
But clothes also produce sound. Especially if the garment is embroidered, as was a famous gown by the late Alexander McQueen, which featured dried and bleached razor clams.
Because the original dress would be so delicate that it would no longer be possible to record the sounds made by its movement, curators made a duplicate – with the same razor clams that McQueen had collected from a beach in Norfolk, England – and then isolated and recorded the sound in an echo-free chamber at Binghamton University. The effect, says Bolton, is “to capture the nuances of the movements.”
The same effect is achieved with the silk taffeta garment, which has a sound called “scroop”, which is a combination of the words “scroop” and “whoop”.
“I know it sounds like a garage band,” quipped Bolton, “but it’s a distinctive sound that Silk makes.” It can be sharp or soft depending on the finishing of the silk. Taffeta has the loudest sound, so this is what visitors to a particular gallery will hear.
And then there is touch.
“It’s one of the difficulties of museums that you can’t touch things,” says the curator. The exhibition aims to change that too. An example: a 17th-century embroidered Jacobean bodice. No, you can’t handle something so delicate. But with the help of 3D scanning, curators have recreated the embroidery on the wallpaper. “The whole room would be covered in this wallpaper,” says Bolton. “You can use your hands to feel the size and complexity of the embroidery.” The same technology will be used to recreate the experience of a Dior dress.
Even with an apparently outdated understanding of vision, the exhibition aims to enhance the viewing experience with animations depicting details of the garment that one cannot see with the naked eye – rather like looking through a microscope.
Bolton says this is one of the most ambitious shows the Costume Institute has ever done, looking through the museum’s entire collection of 33,000 costumes and accessories to choose the final 250.
He hopes that various new technologies will become the norm, and that the institution will be able to create a database of the sounds and smells of certain clothes before they enter the collection – capturing them alive in the “last gasps” of life. Before they become museum pieces. Maybe one day I’ll have to lie in a glass coffin like Sleeping Beauty.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will run from May 10 to September 2, 2024.
