Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

On View

Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
May 10–September 2, 2024

Visual beauty is a given, if not a prerequisite for any summer Costume Institute exhibition, each edition of which is unofficially guaranteed to be a blockbuster. But Andrew Bolton’s curatorial aim for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion lies beyond merely catering to the eye—that’s too easy.

Constantin Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse (1910) greets you, groggily, at the entrance. Nestled into a cozy alcove and set behind glass, the small bronze sculpture distills the serenity of peaceful slumber into a single oval form in balanced repose, unaccompanied by plinth, pillow, or body. It is an apt icon for this year’s show which wrestles with the tangled complexities and contradictions of exhibiting archival fashion. The show’s success rests on striking a delicate balance between making centuries-old artifacts accessible to visitors and the imperative to preserve them for posterity. In other words, the need to let old things rest and the desire to wake them up.

As the story goes, Sleeping Beauty was a princess cursed to sleep for one hundred years, only to be awakened by the kiss of a handsome prince. The Institute’s “sleeping beauties,” meanwhile, are treasured garments afflicted by “inherent vice,” the term referring to garments whose intrinsic properties cause them to deteriorate despite the best efforts of conservationists. These pieces, which include a late nineteenth-century silk satin ball gown designed by Charles Frederick Worth, are typically locked away in hermetically-sealed storage vaults. From the moment they enter the collection, they lay horizontally, kept in the dark, and all but never handled—efforts to delay the garment’s slow self destruction as its ultrafine threads spontaneously and inexorably unravel. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s princely curator-in-charge, enlisted architect Dominic Leong to dream up new ways of giving them life.

Museums have traditionally domesticated vision as the dominant mode of visitor experience, consequently abstracting the objects, and alienating the body’s other senses. Earlier innovations in museum display, such as visible storage—at the Met, see the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art—have followed this script, keeping objects and humans cleanly separated on opposite sides of museum-grade glass. Sleeping Beauties takes up this problem and runs with it into uncharted territory.

The space is permeated by a carefully crafted soundscape that includes some obvious selections, such as Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty, Op.66,” alongside more surprising elements. One passageway is enlivened by the faint rustling of silks, a sound called “scroop”—portmanteau of scrape and whoop—and a significant sartorial concern in historical gown making: obnoxious scroop could spell social disaster for a debutante, for instance. There are elements to be touched, including walls with 3-D-printed surfaces that replicate the intricate embroidery of an untouchable garment, and there are no shortage of visual surprises. One highlight: a hologram fashionista—in fact a Victorian-era Pepper’s Ghost effect—struts along the top of a 1914 satirical book by French caricaturist Georges Goursat. Lampooning the fashion-obsessed, Goursat’s imagined figure is rendered as an insect-humanoid creature decked out in haute couture. Other visual features are more staid and no less spectacular, including immersive projected animations and microscopic views of textile warp-and-weft beamed onto hovering screens.

But it is smell, unexpectedly, that has pride of place in this fashion exhibition—no doubt a first for the Costume Institute. Smell artist Sissel Tolaas has contributed olfactory interventions throughout the exhibition which introduce this largely-overlooked aspect of historical fashion. Leong and his team designed interfaces that enable visitors to sniff the odors that linger on these garments from centuries past. In one display, the odors of delicate “sleeping beauties” are dispersed in gentle puffs of air through winding tubes that connect the inside of the vitrine to the gallery space; visitor and artifact almost share the same air. In another area, the wall surface has been coated with scratch-and-sniff paint infused with rose-scented perfumes which linger in the fabrics of several gowns. In the largest area, the Garden, the passageways and vaults giveaway to a double-height clearing lined with sun-colored dresses on one side and foliage-inspired garments on the other. Along the gallery’s length, a row of hats are housed in a long glass case that resembles a planter, while a dozen-plus wall-mounted glass beakers contain dry granules that reproduce their unique smell profiles.

The exhibition occupies the museum’s large Tisch Galleries with an installation akin to a new building within the building. Aside from the Brancusi, Bolton’s other curatorial icon was a molecule. For Leong, the image inspired a modular exhibition layout of domed spaces linked by vaulted passages. The domes and vaults were prefabricated, made in parts off-site, and then shipped to the museum for assembly. In total, installation took only six weeks—an impressive feat considering the extensive build-out includes lighting, sound, data, and even fire safety systems. You could easily mistake it for a renovation many years in the making.

More than two hundred pieces are on display in a setting that uncannily combines the intimacy of a lush garden with the clinical cool of a high-tech laboratory. White walls run seamlessly along vaulted passageways, their surfaces punctuated by alcove displays of collection pieces. The corridors are bracketed by circular, domed spaces, each containing a highlight at its center atop a brushed-metal pedestal. Like strolling through a formal garden, you stay on the path and are tugged along by distant, enticing views. In one dome, a pint-sized maquette for a Raf Simons-designed and flower-festooned “Miss Dior” gown (2014) stands under a transparent cloche. The display at once calls to mind the enchanted rose of Walt Disney Studios’s animated classic Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the space-age surrealism of Austrian architect Hans Hollein. The show is a feast for the eyes.

Among the Costume Institute’s many exceptional exhibitions, Sleeping Beauties stands out for the experimental ambitions of its curators and its designers. In the process of making a stylish and polished show, Dominic Leong and his team have also forcefully demonstrated innovative possibilities for exhibitions that appeal to broad audiences with unconventional multisensory engagement. For a mammoth, encyclopedic museum whose sheer scale and corresponding inertia could doom new ideas before they ever have a chance to grow, this exhibition shines an exciting light on what the institution can become.