NEW YORK, NY.- When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced that its 2024 spring blockbuster show would be called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” a lot of head-scratching ensued. Was this a show about Disney costumes? Princess frocks? Now the exhibition is actually here, and the answer is: none of the above.
It’s a show built on a base of 15 pieces from the institute’s collection that have become so fragile over time that they can no longer be displayed on mannequins (the “sleeping beauties”), along with more than 200 hardier gowns and accessories reflecting organic themes such as roses, butterflies and beetles (nature also being fragile). Its curators seek to “reawaken” these items with a dash of technology and a soupcon of sensory overload: touch, smell and sound. Imagine the ghostly rustling of silk taffeta, the clinking of giant paillettes, brought back to life by scientists and engineers. It’s not your usual fashion exhibit. But what exactly is it?
Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic, and Jason Farago, critic-at-large, debated the result. These are edited excerpts from their conversation.
FRIEDMAN: This exhibit struck me as both wildly ambitious — with its use of AI, video, molecular science, sound and touch to enliven the multiple dimensions of the 250 garments and accessories from five centuries on display, creating what the Met director Max Hollein called a “grand multisensory experiment” — and yet oddly minor. I think it’s because, with the feel-me walls, the bend-’n’-sniff tubes, the claymationlike animated embroideries, it seemed like a grown-up version of the children’s “discovery” gallery, but with much chicer clothes. Still, there’s a very provocative big idea hiding under all theatrics: that once fashion enters the museum and falls into hands of a conservator, it becomes an object and effectively “dies.” Ka-pow!
FARAGO: You’re right to compare it to a children’s museum, with its fetishization of interactivity, immediacy and the primacy of the senses. (“Use all your senses, class!” Kindergarten vibes.) There are also passages that feel more clinical: simulations of the laboratory, with analytical diagrams that graph the precise dye content of yellow dresses, and crystals to sniff from round-bottom flasks.
Continuous curved white walls — this show’s been designed by the hip firm Leong Leong — also give the show the feel of the lab, or even, if we were being ungenerous, a mental institution. One early gallery replicates the texture of a Christian Dior dress as 3D-printed urethane wallpaper: an LVMH padded cell.
But more than any of those, this spectacle of fashion made me think of an exhibition format that thrived last decade: immersive, brightly colored museumlike attractions, like the Museum of Ice Cream or the interactive rooms of teamLab, which offer chromatic stimulation and frequent selfie opportunities. These tourist-trap “museums” — the word offers a veneer of culture, but they’re more like fun houses — arose alongside Instagram in the mid-2010s, and I’d note that TikTok is the lead sponsor of this exhibition, and of the Met Gala.
FRIEDMAN: Well, as we both know, the Costume Institute is the only department in the museum that has to pay for its own operating budget — and shows. So you follow the money. And certainly, part of the role of fashion in this museum, especially since the curator Andrew Bolton took over and started creating these conceptual extravaganzas, has been to be the more accessible entry point to the grand institution, and get people through the doors. I remember a former curator, Harold Koda, telling me that the museum once measured the decibel levels of different exhibits, and they were by far the highest for the Costume Institute shows, because everyone feels confident in having an opinion about clothes. And I do think this show will be a talker, both because many of the clothes on display are very gorgeous, and because of the “Pat-the-Bunny”-like aspects. What say you?
FARAGO: I’ve got real reservations about the interactivity and immersion, which undercuts this show’s efforts to look at clothing through scientific and poetic lenses at once. That bifocal technique is an intriguing approach, and maybe “Sleeping Beauties” might have been twice as good with half the budget.
But we should talk about the substance of this show before we get into the style — insofar as the two can be cleaved apart.
FRIEDMAN: The explanation has to do with the decay, or ephemerality, of clothing in the museum’s collection (clothes that have an “inherent vice,” which is my new favorite term), which got Bolton thinking about flora, fauna, etc., etc., which led to the themes he used to bulk out the exhibit. That’s a somewhat chaotic rationale, but it can essentially be boiled down to: Fashion has been influenced by nature since it became fashion!
Which is — duh — pretty obvious, but also fun to look at. Who doesn’t want to spend some time gazing at Dior’s masterpiece of a scalloped gown, frothing with beads, or a Paquin poppy frock from 1937 in plisse chiffon with the delicacy of flower petals, or a Loewe overcoat from a recent runway show, sprouting real grass? (That last one has to be replaced by a new version every week or so, because the grass can’t survive that long without being watered.) The sheer visual appeal of these clothes makes a compelling argument that some designs, at least, have the timeless appeal of great art.
FARAGO: The core of the exhibition (or what should be the core) consists of 15 dresses from the Costume Institute collection, plus that Loewe lawn coat, that are succumbing to that inherent vice. These are displayed lying flat in airtight vitrines. On a lavender evening dress from 1902, made for Alexandra of Denmark, you can see gashes in the disintegrating silk netting: one false move and the sequins fall right off. There’s another gown from the same year, designed by the House of Worth, that was treated with metallic salts to stiffen the taffeta. Now those salts are breaking down the fabric.
What Bolton has tried to do is to reanimate these gowns with supplementary scientific (or science-lite) displays. A dress from the 19th century has been rendered as a CGI gown on a dancing avatar. There are lenticular photographs that suggest the movement of silk as you walk past, and an audio track of the sound of rustling taffeta.
The most notable sensory experiences, though, are olfactory.
FRIEDMAN: Apparently, the smells made the museum very nervous! They didn’t want anyone to feel assaulted by having to endure the scent of human hair from a hat, and so on. Personally, I very much enjoyed the pat-’n’-sniff wall in the “Specter of the Rose” gallery, which allows a visitor to release the smells that have been lifted from a Paul Poiret dress and pair of House of Drecoll gowns and embedded in the paint. Ditto the glass tubes that emitted little puffs of scent in the space devoted to Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, which attempts to re-create her own … um … body odor as unearthed from her clothes — say, a Schiaparelli cocktail dress covered in garden blooms — and environments. And I appreciated that the scents were not about perfume brands. They were about the garments themselves, and the lifestyles of the people who wore them.
FARAGO: You liked it more than me. I went through the rest of my afternoon with the waxy stench of that Poiret dress on my fingertips.
FRIEDMAN: Of all the “activations,” though, my favorite was the opening salvo: a hologram of that 1887 Worth dress, reclining IRL in a glass vitrine, but here brought back to life and waltzing in air. I thought that was utterly charming, and more successful than the AI chatbot answering questions about the final dress: a thoroughly modern white silk wedding gown by Callot Soeurs worn by New York socialite Natalie Potter for her 1930 nuptials. That felt to me like the curators trying too hard to be of the moment. Though I thought the 1869 wood fan once owned by a woman named Flora Miller displayed with it was fascinating: A handwritten “diary” of her first three weeks of married life, written longhand on the slats but faded, was reconstituted through multispectral imaging.
FARAGO: I am begging museums to chill with the chatbots. For our readers alone, I consented to the indignity of speaking to it. “Natalie,” I asked, “what do you think of Andrew Bolton’s tenure as curator of the Costume Institute?” The bot responded, “Andrew Bolton’s vision for the Costume Institute resonates with his discerning taste and scholarly depth. His exhibitions are notably meticulous and thought-provoking.” Hey, who needs critics!?
But this AI aristocrat — this imitation of life — does return us to the broader and trickier theme of “Sleeping Beauties” that you initially mentioned, Vanessa, and that’s the life and death of clothes. Bolton’s efforts to “revive” or “reanimate” the garments here parallels larger anxieties we all have about museums. A museum is a machine (I’m ventriloquizing the anthropologist James Clifford here) that transform artifacts into art. You can’t dance anymore with the African or Oceanic masks in the Met’s Rockefeller Wing. No one comes to the medieval wing to venerate the saints in the icons. These objects, once they enter the museum, have to submit to new regimes of looking.
And “Sleeping Beauties” legitimates a broader doubt today about museum display and preservation. We want to make cultural objects alive again, both for methodological purposes (they had a use before they came here) and for audience delight (they look better on TikTok). But with fashion, there is an extra twist of the knife — fashion is ephemeral to begin with.
FRIEDMAN: Which is why there is a perennial “Is it art?” debate. If you wear it, is it art? If you can play with it — as you can here — is it art?
This exhibit is part of a continuum of shows by Bolton that interrogate bigger issues about fashion and technology (I think of 2016’s “Manus x Machina”) and fashion and time (2020’s “About Time: Fashion and Duration”), in part to justify their place in the museum. Though even if you don’t respond to the theory, you can just enjoy the beautiful clothes, and the games. In this case, however, I also think that effort to “big up” the idea with the interactions — complex and experimental though they were to produce — may end up undercutting its seriousness.
FARAGO: “Manus x Machina” was my favorite of those three shows, by far, because it took a hyped-up idea in the broader culture — technology’s changing everything! — and historicized it, unpacked it, slowed it down. That’s what a great museum show can do. And “Sleeping Beauties” achieves that in places, mostly when it walks away from the science lab and enters the domain of history and art.
I keep thinking about these glass buttons from ancien regime France, which had dried insects embedded within them. You could swan through Versailles with dead bugs on your waistcoat! (And, little did you know, the revolution was going to squash you like a bug by the 1790s.) They were followed by two acetate chokers from the House of Schiaparelli, affixed with hand-painted brass beetles and dragonflies, and then a skintight “butterfly” dress — the butterfly wings are actually painted turkey feathers — from Sarah Burton’s first collection for Alexander McQueen. Here we have a real demonstration of scientific and symbolic continuity over 200 years, which carries much more weight than the Cinderella-in-springtime graphics and sounds.
FRIEDMAN: Your mention of the revolution is very apropos, given the inspiration for the Gala’s lavish dress code: J.G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time,” the short story that I read as about the end of the aristocracy. What Bolton said attracted him to the phrase was the idea of gardens and time, and their connection to the exhibit, rather than the macro subtext. And indeed, that may be the best way to enjoy the show. Part of the appeal of Costume Institute exhibits is the vicarious imagining: Would I wear that Iris Van Herpen dress that looks like a collection of oily tentacles? What about that Alexander McQueen dress of clanking razor clamshells? Who wore it? And what was the world like, where such a garment was possible?
This exhibit leans into those ideas, and it makes visitors want to lean right back — literally. Lean down and smell the molecules! Lean back and watch the videos of circling birds on the ceiling. Lean over and touch the wall. Lean close, and look.
—
‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’: Through Sept. 2 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; metmuseum.org
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
