“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” is better experienced than described, but if anyone is up to the task of talking about it, it is artist/photographer and the exhibition’s creative consultant Nick Knight. The founder of the fashion website SHOWStudio, Knight combines a thorough knowledge of history with a curious and adventurous spirit, plus an unbreakable faith in the future. “No species ever evolves towards the negative,” he said in a wide-ranging conversation about fashion’s meaning and uses, science, technology, and the cyclical nature of things. Knight believes “Sleeping Beauties” is a “watershed show.” Find out why, below.
The Future Is Now
“I love exhibitions which leave you more excited for the future and not just wishing you’d been in the past. I think ‘Sleeping Beauties’ is a very future-looking exhibition, and it does start to introduce the public to an understanding not only of how vital fashion is as an art form, [but] as a sort of societal energy force. You can tell a lot about a society if you look back at fashion because [it represents] our aspirations. It’s not who we were; it’s not just a mirror, it’s actually who we want to be or who we wanted to be. By putting on that whatever—a pair of jeans, or incredible dress, or fantastic hat—we wanted to say who we wanted to be. It’s almost our fantasy version of ourselves, which is probably much more interesting than the reality of who we are. Those dreams, those aspirations, which make people buy clothes, are so important to understand.”
New Views on Old Clothes
“The problem that [fashion] galleries across the world have always had is that you can take a beautiful dress by Charles Frederick Worth, or whoever it is, and you can put it on a mannequin and you can put an exhibition, but it just doesn’t have any life in it anymore. We know that it’s not the fact that somebody’s got a white shirt on—it’s how they wear that white shirt, it’s the attitude we bring to a piece of clothing—which brings it alive.
The piece of clothing itself [can be] fascinating, [as can] the skill in making it and the dyes it’s been made of—all that’s interesting and it’s also part of the exhibition. But the really interesting thing is [how science and technology] start to free fashion up to become again something living and you can understand why people were excited about it.”
The Dancing Dress
“In the exhibition, the very first thing you see in terms of that sort of interaction is this beautiful Pepper’s Ghost of a [Charles Frederick] Worth dress. It’s moving…you can sort of imagine it dancing across the ballroom again.
We’ve had the privilege to work with the conservators, and, of course, they know everything. So you look at the dress and you say, ‘Okay, well why does it move that way?’ Well, because it’s got six petticoats underneath it and they’re made of this material. So there’s all this information about the structure of the dress, which we can bring back to it. But on top of that, there’s a sort of societal structure to it: Why they wore it, how they stood in it? Did they expect to dance a lot, or not at all? Would people be sitting down? How would it be viewed; by candle light, by gaslight? That’s where the Met [archivists] are so brilliant because they have this wealth of knowledge.
The sound of a dress was really important in its selling, to articulate this fantastic ‘scroop.’ That’s a strange word which is used to describe this sound of taffeta moving against duchesse satin or whatever it is. If your dress had a very high scroop value, it was fantastic; if it had a pretty low scroop value, you didn’t really want it. We never think of these things, we never approach dresses in that way—what sound it would’ve made?—but the Met exhibition does.
The idea of how technology is being used to make fashion live again is the foundation of the exhibition. When you put a dress in a museum [collection], you can only touch it with gloved hands. You certainly can’t wear it anymore, let alone go dancing in it, or flirt or fall in love in it; it has to be treated very, very preciously. And so it should be, because I think fashion is very precious. However, it then does start to fade and to die and to slightly deteriorate.
Some of the dresses are so old now that if you pick them up, the weight of the silk would just tear the dress, so you’re not even allowed to lift them anymore, let alone put them on a mannequin. [In the case of the avatars] we scanned the dresses lying flat, the conservators created a pattern of them and then [SHOWstudio] recreated them [digitally]. That’s something that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, you couldn’t have done five years ago. [But now] you have this moving, dancing, gliding dress again.”
The Medium Is the Message
“There’s one room in the exhibition that has an Alexander McQueen jacket in it, which is based on a Vionnet; the Vionnet dress has black swallows all over it. Projected on the ceiling is a blue sky, and first one swallow goes round, and then another swallow, and two or three and it’s all very lovely. Then slowly they build up and build up and build up until the whole sky is blotted out by the blackness; it’s very Hitchcock The Birds. It was Vionnet’s intention to say that something was brewing in 1930s Europe, something very deeply unpleasant. So [this activation] isn’t about the fabric of the dress, this isn’t about the designer, it is about the spirit of the dress; what it was saying, what conversation that dress was having. What we tried to do is work on different levels in the Met; yes, it’s about the construction of the dress, [but it’s also about] other things, it’s about what that dress was actually trying to say, what it was trying to do.”
The Talking Dress
“The very last dress in the exhibition is this beautiful Callot Soeurs wedding dress. Not only can you ask questions to the dress with AI, you can ask questions to the wearer [Natalie Potter]—who probably when she got divorced and thought, ‘I’m going to donate my wedding dress to the Met and I’m moving on in my life’—didn’t expect a hundred years later have to be back up again in it and talking in it.”
Fashion and the Senses
“‘Sleeping Beauties’ is also about fashion and the senses. At a lot of exhibitions you’re sort of mute as the audience: You go and you appreciate and that’s it. Here we tried to stimulate the senses. There are some things you can touch, and you have the smells that scent artist Sissel Tolaas created; smells of dresses and the different people who wore the dresses. Of course there’s the visual [aspect] and we’ve taken dresses down to an anechoic chamber and listened to them scroop away.”
Fashion and Nature
“We tried to engage all different senses, and then on top of that, there’s a whole thing about nature. Fashion has got a problem—the problem is it’s the third biggest polluter on the planet—and it can’t really continue to hide and pretend that it hasn’t. Fashion has to deal with that, and it has to [ask], do we all want so much? Is there a way that we need to start to think about our lives and who we are in a different form?
In some ways that brings back the technological part of it because if you have an avatar, you can dress yourself completely differently from the avatar. You can now start to create a multitude of visions of yourself, a different persona if you will. I think that allows us to sort of look at what we’re doing, and think, ‘Do we need all of this stuff all the time?’ ‘How many more trainers, how many more little black dresses, how many more handbags?’
We all know we want things to look good. We all know we want things to show off with. We all know we want things to show that we know; we want some sort of reflected knowledge by the understanding of fashion.
This is, in my opinion, quite a watershed show. I think this exhibition will start to show people a way of showing garments and making them interesting and not feel like they’re covered in a little layer of dust. I think that’s the sad thing when you go to [see fashion in] museums; they all have the same problem, when you see the dress in the vitrine you think ‘The Swinging Sixties, really?’ You need to get some sensory perception of why that fashion was so important in that time.”
The Art of Fashion?
“There’s sort of a debate of whether fashion is an art form or not and should be given the same respect as imore established art forms. I think it’s largely a Protestant problem. In the west—North America and England—we are primarily a Protestant culture and we don’t celebrate decoration. We see vanity as a sin; it’s all slightly uptight.
There’s an exhibition in London [about John Singer Sargent]; they found the dresses that were in the paintings and exhibited those next to the paintings, and a critic for one of the British newspapers who was offended by this said [something like], ‘As if Singer Sargent would care.’ ….[Actually,] Sargent was certainly excited by what these society women were wearing…it was a way of showing who they were.
I think people are coming around to [fashion], but still it reminds me a little bit of how I used to read about contemporary art in some of the same newspapers, which would take it apart and say, ‘A monkey could do this.’ They would never say that about contemporary art now. [The media] is starting to wake up to how foolish they sound when they talk about fashion. But it’s not our problem; we’ll let them catch up at their own rate. I think the proposal in ‘Sleeping Beauties’ actually is really important and something which does start—not to convince people, but to show by pleasure—how important this stuff is and how complex it is.”
Beyond Technology
“People have talked a lot about the technological aspect of this exhibition and of course it’s there; AI underpins a lot of the activations, and it’s all very exciting. But we’ve also gone right back to painting. Pepper’s Ghost is a very old theater technique where you basically have a mirror that is angled so the public can’t see it’s angled, that’s reflecting [an image]. Back in the day, it would’ve been an actor under the stage, today it’s reflecting a big LED screen, so that it appears that the person that you’re seeing is somehow floating in space. But it’s an old technique. Tech is funny because in some ways it’s interesting and in some ways some of the tech we use shapes the art we create with it; but in other ways it’s not a very interesting conversation. How interesting would it be to work out what paintbrush Francis Bacon used? It would be a bit interesting, but maybe not compared to what he was saying. So I think we have to be careful to protect that [and see that tech] doesn’t become the conversation, because it’s not there for that. It’s there to simply enable conversations to happen, but it isn’t an end in itself.”
What Comes Around, Goes Around
“I think we have to wind back quite a way to get some sort of context for this [technological turning point]. Fashion imagery has been going for some time, but it was really Mr. Condé Nast who started in 1915, to say ‘I don’t want fashion illustration. There’s a new exciting medium of photography on the scene and that’s much better for fashion. And I want my magazines to be behind fashion photography, and the highest level of fashion photography, as well.’ So he [hired in-house photographers]; Baron Adolf de Meyer was the first one, Steichen came later, and they set a very high bar.
That was a huge technological shift; I mean now it seems slightly quaint compared to what we are going through, but it was a very similar sort of thing. If you take it back a little bit further, the advent of photography was a huge shift in visual communication. And the funny thing about some of the debates that we hear now, they remind me of what were probably the debates at the time. ‘Oh, it’s just a mechanical thing, how can it reflect human nature?’ ‘How can photography ever be more than a technical rendition of reality?’ Of course, photography has proved itself as an incredible art form, just the same as painting or sculpture, or any of the established art forms. I think that debate is very similar to where we are now, and I think we’re having, in my opinion, a slightly alarmist debate about the introduction of things like AI and 3-D scanning and a whole sort of different way of working.
It is also, in my opinion, a much bigger step. The step from painting to photography is big, obviously, but I think the step we’re going through now is very, very different. It’s not just about an artist expressing themselves: It changes the relationship with the artist to the audience; it changes the relationship with the artist to the support that they have, whether it’s a gallery, magazine—whatever it is—but that relationship is fundamentally being altered.
The challenge is not to get alarmist about this sort of thing and to try and understand that it’s development, it’s our evolution as a species. All these things are A) inevitable, and B) we evolve towards the positive: No species ever evolves towards the negative, however it might feel we’re going that way at times. That’s not what evolution’s about.
A lot of this stuff is so big, it’s very hard to see the edges of it. When huge societal changes happen, cultural changes happen, and you are on a sort of wave that’s crashing as they’re forming. It’s very hard to see how big it is and what effect it’s going to have. My feeling is it’s a total revolution in our species. I really think that we will all be able to do things we couldn’t do before, to understand things the way we couldn’t understand them before, to not feel that we are so typecast into a certain way of behaving. AI has been around for 30, 40 years now, but only in the last year or so has it become this thing that everybody knows. But everybody understands, accepts, thinks, understands, and everybody sort of gets all worked up about.
But it is allowing us to do things which previously were almost unimaginable. There’s something that I wrote in my epilogue in the catalog, which I think is an important thing to try and realize. I think I said that we all presume that we are at the end of the evolutionary journey. Are we? Where’s the proof of that? Maybe we’re halfway through, two-thirds through, or maybe just at the beginning….”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
