Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion—Exhibition Tour with Andrew Bolton | Met Exhibitions
Join Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, on a tour of the exhibition "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion."
The Costume Institute's spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, reactivates the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum's collection through first-hand research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies—from cutting-edge tools of artificial intelligence and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes.
On view through September 2, 2024.
1)
00:10
We are in the exhibition "Sleeping Beauties: Awakening Fashion". And I'm happy to take you on a tour. When an item of clothing enters the Costume Institute's collection, its status is irrevocably changed.
What was once a vital part of a person's lived experience becomes an inanimate work of art that can no longer be worn, heard, touched, or smelled.
2)
00:31
The exhibition seeks to reanimate garments from our permanent collection by reactivating their sensory qualities and re-engaging our perceptions.
It aims to extend the primarily visual readings of fashion in museums to multi-sensory and non-visual interpretations. The exhibition unfolds as a series of case studies linked to the theme of nature.
3)
00:55
Our collection represents fashion inspired by the natural environment, including flowers and foliage, birds and insects, and fish and shells.
Motifs comprise the exhibition's three sections: Earth, Air, and Water. In many ways, nature is the ultimate metaphor for fashion. It represents rebirth and renewal but also transience and impermanence.
4)
01:18
These latter qualities are evident in the Sleeping Beauties that underpin several case studies, which self-destruct over time. Let's start the tour.
The first dress we encounter in the exhibition is Sleeping Beauty, which suffers from inherent vice, a term conservators use to describe an artwork's inherent equality that causes its ruin.
5)
01:44
In clothing, inherent vice comes from various factors, including the materials themselves, which is the case with this remarkable ball gown by Charles Frederick Worth.
As you can see, the pale green satin has suffered a catastrophic loss of its vertical warp threads, resulting in large areas where only the horizontal wear threads remain.
6)
02:06
In contrast, the ivory satin is still robust despite similar wear, suggesting that the green fabric has an inherent weakness. Unfortunately, no current conservation treatment can fully stabilise the satin.
The gown's extreme fragility precludes it from being dressed on a mannequin.
7)
02:26
So, the exhibition displays it flat in a glass case, like all the other Sleeping Beauties.
Although this display is conservation-friendly, it denies visitors the most authentic expression of the dress, which requires the dimensionality of a body. We resurrected the dress through a pepper ghost hologram to simulate its intended appearance.
8)
02:49
To achieve this, the dress underwent an extensive regime of digital scanning, photography, construction analysis and pattern making, and the content was then manipulated to fit a digital avatar.
The dress was designed to be worn at a ball, so we decided that the pepper ghost should dance. This involved motion-capturing the movements of a professional dancer and applying them to the avatar.
9)
03:15
The first section of the Earth exhibition celebrates flowers in fashion and explores their representation and symbolism. Here we are in the gallery called Blurred Blossoms.
Floral imagery was the most popular source of clothing patterns in the 18th century, as seen in the Robe à la Français from the 1750s and 1760s.
10)
03:41
The blurred floral pattern achieves its painterly effect through a labour-intensive technique called chiné a la branch. Perfected in Lyon in the first half of the 18th century, it involved dyeing groups of warp threads, known as branches, before weaving the fabric.
During the weaving process, the slight tugging of the thread created a hazy, watercolour-like appearance.
11)
04:06
In motion, the chiné silk produced a rustling sound known as a scroop, a combination of the words scrape and whoop, which visitors can hear echoing down the corridor.
Here we are in the Red Rose Gallery. Few flowers, if any, have been more extolled by poets and painters than the red rose, which they have used as a symbol of love, beauty, romance, passion, and sexuality.
12)
04:46
Designers have also embraced the rose, as seen in some examples, such as sartorial sonnets and sculptures.
Philip Treacy's headpiece evokes the flower's fragility, as visualised in the animation and realised in Sleeping Beauty, whose scent molecules emanate from the tubes on the wall.
13)
05:09
The headpiece is red silk duchesse satin for the flower head and green silk polyester satin for the stem, decorated with natural acacia thorns.
Yves Saint Laurent's evening gown from his debut collection for Dior is a tribute to Christian Dior, who is passionate about roses and red.
14)
05:31
Saint Laurent incorporated other elements of Dior's stylistic lexicon into this homage, such as the asymmetrical sweep of the bodice with its virtuoso wet drape and spiral effect, which gives the illusion that the dress is made of one continuous length of fabric.
Molecules from the dress can also be smelled through the tubes on the wall.
15)
05:59
This gallery is called The Scent of a Man.
The two ensembles shown here were featured in Francesco Risso's Spring/Summer 2024 collection for Marni, based on scent and the memories it evokes.
Each dress in the collection was sprayed with a scent inspired by Risso's memory of a chance encounter with a young man during a visit to Paris when he was 14.
16)
06:26
The ensembles' decoupage look refers to an elaborate 19th-century scrapbook Risso found at a flea market in London.
Both pieces consist of a cotton canvas base digitally printed with a floral pattern, onto which hand-cut flowers of the same pattern have been glued.
17)
06:49
This ensemble features hand-painted aluminium flowers on wire stems that are only fully appreciated in motion.
The sounds can be heard in the corridor, reminding us that aurality is no less central to memory recovery than smell.
Here we are in the gallery, The Garden, which appears to be a garden planted with hats and dresses and blooming with various flowers.
18)
07:24
Here, we see Christian Dior's ball gown, "May," which was part of his "Tulip" line for Spring/Summer 1953.
It comprises a fitted, strapless bodice and a full, dome-shaped skirt embroidered with summer grasses and red clovers.
The embroidery was done by Rébé, whose pattern of grass-turned-weeds is interspersed with the distinctive trifoliate leaves of the red clover and some rarer quadrifoliate leaves.
19)
07:56
Lily of the valley was Dior's lucky flower, and his sewists would incorporate a sprig of the flower into the hemlines of his clothes.
This coat was featured in Jonathan Anderson's Spring/Summer 2023 menswear collection for LOEWE. Its green display of organic embroidery, which negotiates the paradox of nature and artifice, is a metaphor for fashion's transience.
20)
08:27
The coat was a collaboration with Paula Ulargui Escalona, a bio-designer who grows plants on clothes to create a more conscious and sustainable fashion industry.
She planted the coat with oats, rye and wheatgrass, which took 20 days to grow in a purpose-built greenhouse, as seen in the time-lapse video.
21)
08:52
Here we are in The Garden Live gallery, and this particular case study is a transitional gallery between the Earth and Air themes of the exhibition, exploring the abundant life of gardens.
Gardening and embroidery were closely related in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, with each discipline borrowing from the other.
22)
09:15
A style of gardening known as embroidery became popular throughout Europe. Imitating the type of needlework seen on such garments, a woman's waistcoat was embroidered between 1615 and 1620.
The embroidery depicts a vision of an English garden bursting with life. Strawberries are ripening, pea pods are bursting, and birds are snatching dragonflies.
23)
09:41
The animation projected onto the domed ceiling brings this dynamic arcadia to life. The gallery walls also describe the tactile experience of wearing such a densely embroidered garment.
This dress by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel is directly inspired by the embroidery style of the women's waistcoat.
24)
10:04
Lagerfeld was an incurable, if somewhat provocative, historicist, and here he combines the abundance of English Renaissance embroidery with the house of Chanel's most recognisable icon, the double C logo.
Here we are in the Beetle Wings gallery. Beetles make up about 1/4 of all animal species on Earth, and humans have been using them as ornaments for centuries.
25)
10:37
The garments on display here explore this legacy of adornment in various ways.
They range from the hyperreal, as in Olivia Cheng's organza dress covered with whole, sustainably harvested jewel beetles, to the abstract, as in Dries Van Noten's ensemble embellished with synthetic beetle wing sequins.
Van Noten's ensemble was inspired by Jan Fabre's 2002 installation 'Heaven of Delight' at the Palais Royal in Brussels, where the artist covered the ceiling with over 1.5 million elytra,
26)
11:13
an effect simulated in the animation. Here we are in the butterfly gallery.
Butterflies have fluttered across the pages of poets in countless euphoric and enigmatic metaphors.
Still, perhaps the most universal is the transformation that results from their unique life cycle, from caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly, figuratively embodying life, death and rebirth.
27)
11:40
At the centre of this gallery is Sarah Burton's 'Butterfly' dress, featured in her debut collection for Alexander McQueen after the company's eponymous founder and Burton's mentor took his life eight months earlier.
The dress is veneered with turkey feathers that have been cut, died and painted to mimic the iconic pattern of the monarch butterfly.
28)
12:04
The Monarch symbolises hope, resilience, and endurance. Its annual 3000-mile migration across North America, evoked in the animation that fills the gallery, symbolises hope, resilience, and endurance.
Milkweed, the only plant on which female monarchs can lay their eggs and on which their caterpillars can feed, provides vital fuel for the insects' annual migration.
29)
12:30
Hillary Taymour celebrated this unique relationship forged by nature in her Collina Strada Spring/Summer 2023 collection "Got Milkweed?", which included the deadstock silk organza dress pictured here.
The collection was shown at the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative's Naval Cemetery Landscape, an official monarch sanctuary.
30)
12:55
Charles James reflected and realised the fleeting beauty of the butterfly in his iconic 'Butterfly' ball gown of 1955. It features a figure-hugging chrysalis bodice of pleated silk chiffon over a silk satin ground and an exuberant winged bustle skirt of nylon tulle.
However, as its Sleeping Beauty doppelganger reveals, the fragility of its materials, combined with the volatility of its construction, foretells its inevitable demise.
31)
13:27
While the damaged garment was used as a showpiece by a designer and later by museums, the other was worn only a few times and carefully stored in the owner's wardrobe for almost 60 years.
Having passed through the gallery of birds, we're now in the gallery of the nightingale and the rose. "As the moon shone in the sky, the nightingale flew to the rose tree and put her breast against the thorn.
32)
14:03
This stunning necklace by Simon Costin comprises interlocking patinated brass thorns enclosing the body of a taxidermy nightingale.
It was inspired by Oscar Wilde's 1888 tale "The Nightingale and the Rose", in which a nightingale spills its lifeblood by piercing its breast against the thorn of a rose bush to produce a perfect red rose for a lovesick boy.
33)
14:30
Surrounding Costin's neck is an arena of millinery from Wilde's tale to the early 20th century, a macabre index of brutality and creativity.
This cruel fashion, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of birds being killed each year, led to the formation of conservation organisations such as the Audubon Society in the United States and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in England.
34)
15:02
The next few galleries explore the theme of water. This particular case study examines the enduring appeal of seashells, partly due to their ability to amplify ambient sound frequencies.
Alexander McQueen exploited the inherent resonance of shells in his 'razor clam' dress, which can be heard in the hallway.
35)
15:25
His "Voss" collection featured the dress, which juxtaposed Victorian depictions of madness with the sublime beauty of nature.
Here we are in a gallery called The Siren. In her original incarnation, the mythological Siren was depicted as a birdwoman. In the seventh century, she was shown with a fish's tail, and by the Middle Ages, her reputation as a deadly, sea-dwelling seductress was firmly established.
36)
15:52
In much of Africa and the African diaspora, the siren archetype finds a counterpart, a sire named Wata, whose origins can be traced to ancient African water spirits.
Her regional analogue, Mongwa Wa Letsa, inspired Thebe Magugu's 'Shipwreck' ensemble.
Her print is derived from Louis Le Breton's engraving 'West Indies Hurricane of 1780', which depicts ships amid capsizing, a scene evoked in the film projected in the gallery.
37)
16:24
Mami Wata's intangible form is also realised in Torishéju Dumi's ensembles.
Both are made from deadstock offcuts, pieced together on the bias and finished with overlock stitching to create a rippling effect that manifests a human-fish hybrid.
Here we are in the final gallery, The Mermaid Bride. This bridal ensemble belonged to New York socialite Natalie Potter, who wore it at her wedding to William Conkling Ladd on December 4 1930.
38)
17:06
Its cathedral-length train features a sweep of interlocking scallops that evoke undulating ocean waves and the concentric circles of seashells.
Designed by the Callot Soeurs at the dawn of the Great Depression, it's devoid of lavish surface embellishment and made from a blend of silk and cellulose acetate. This emerging synthetic fibre provided an inexpensive alternative to silk.
39)
17:33
While the overblouse recalls the androgynous silhouette of the youthful 1920s garçonne, the skirt, with its elongated hem, anticipates the more mature and feminine aesthetic of the 1930s.
Potter posed in her wedding ensemble for a portrait by Adolf de Meyer, displayed on a screen in the gallery.
40)
17:56
Visitors can learn more about Potter, her wedding and her ensemble by scanning the QR code on the screen to speak directly to her using artificial intelligence.
The ultimate ambitions for the exhibition are long-term rather than short-term.
They include expanding the predominantly unisensory visual readings of fashion in museums to include multi-sensory and non-visual interpretations, recognising the essential conservation and preservation needs of costumes, and creating sensory, experiential, and enlightening exhibitions that encourage personal and participatory connections.
41)
18:33
This exhibition reminds us that although the displayed garments are destined for an eternal slumber within museum walls, they haven't forgotten their sensory history.
Instead, they're embedded in the very fibres of their being and need to be reactivated by the minds, bodies, hearts, and souls of those willing to dream and imagine.
We hope you enjoy their temporary reawakening.
Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion—Exhibition Tour with Andrew Bolton | Met Exhibitions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2bOFdvcLEc
100 Years of Fashionable Womenswear: 1830s – 1930s | V&A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SC2OLpSoc&t=317s
Add info)
Brahms Symphony 1 Violin Solo - Daishin Kashimoto, Guy Braunstein, Noah Bendix-Balgley (Berlin Phil)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDM-DWjV6AA
Daishin Kashimoto - Wikipedia
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%A8%AB%E6%9C%AC%E5%A4%A7%E9%80%B2
MENDELSSOHN Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 Daishin Kashimoto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o34eKjoWTCg
Daishin Kashimoto (born March 27, 1979) is a Japanese violinist.
He is the first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and currently resides in Germany.
He was born in London, where his father, who worked for the shipbuilding division of Sumitomo Heavy Industries, was posted. He started playing the violin at the age of three. When his father was transferred to New York, he enrolled in Juilliard School Pre-College at seven.
