Inside The Exhibition: Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion

People in the 18th and 19th century,

they could actually control the sound of their clothing.

And it was part of the art form of fashion

was to control how your garment sounds.

[pensive music] [insects chirping]

[tranquil music]

[light clicking]

Sleeping Beauties is a collection-based exhibition,

so it's focusing on our permanent collection

and the idea is to reawaken garments

in our collection through the senses.

I heard a young girl, probably nine or 10,

asking a security guard, you know,

Why can't I touch this?

Which is a completely normal question

for a nine-year-old in a museum context.

The young children, try to deconstruct museum etiquette

and make it more accessible to a younger audience.

[tranquil music] [lock clicking]

In a way, this was the most ambitious show we've done

because narrative and interpretation

is really what a curator does.

But to try and sort of resurrect

and reawaken garments in our care is something

that has been, you know, challenging in terms of trying

to control notions of preservation and conservation,

but still keeping an accessibility,

a sensorial access to garments.

Fashion is such a living art form

and when a garment enters the collection,

its status changes irrevocably.

It can't be worn, it can't be smelt,

it can't be heard, it can't be touched.

And in the exhibition, some garments are so fragile

that they can't even be worn on a mannequin.

So they're lying flat in the exhibition.

We've thought of ways to try

and reawaken the three dimensionality of those garments.

The reason that this piece was selected

to be a Sleeping Beauty is because of its inherent vice.

This is a quality of an object, whether it's relating

to its materials

or its construction that is inherent to the object

but causes it to degrade over time.

So the inherent vice in this garment in particular

is the weighted silk that is the entire piece

is constructed out of.

It's almost like their last gasp

of being seen by the public.

So we're constantly trying to balance

that display of these objects.

[tissue rustling]

Sometimes it's the mundane, the rolling of tissue

that becomes a very specialized skill

that people often don't think about.

Like, we're good at crafting out of paper

because of the unusual objects that come our way.

We're working on sort of a proof of concept

on how we wanna display this.

So this Fortuny gown has all kinds of tension going on

with it, with the pleats, and we want it to lay nice

and flat, but it also has a lot of splits and everything.

So we need to be able to support that.

[Bethany] So this is an example

of our in-process detective work.

Yeah, you gotta kinda get up close

and personal with the object,

figure out what's safe about it, what's not.

This is our other inherent vice

where these heavy beads are contrasting

against this very light silk that will pull on it

and if it was on a mannequin,

could change the shape of the garment.

[Marci] She's not going out and partying tonight.

[both laughing]

She's had a life.

[lively music]

Part of a role of a curator and a conservator is obviously

to preserve and conserve the garment.

So when we acquire the garment, we store it in a humidity

and temperature-controlled environment, limited lighting.

So in a way, it's in a sort of sleep mode.

It's sleeping temporarily in our store room.

And part of our job is to reawaken them to preserve.

But it's also to to showcase

and also to showcase the original intention

of that particular garment, which is to smell it,

it is to touch it, it is to hear it.

[lock clicking]

In a way, clothing's like a fingerprint.

We've got rose hats, lilac hats, carnations,

and you expect to smell a rose or a carnation,

but you're really smelling is all the people,

the person who wore it, but also the people

who handled it all over the years.

So it really is a sort of life history,

a smellscape of a garment or an accessory.

It's a little bit ironic that, you know,

we're creating these digital representations

of the objects to preserve them,

but it's sort of at the cost

of preserving the physical object.

So that's something that you really have to think about.

What serves the public interest more,

preserving the physical object

or having people have the different

or more intimate relationship with the object through some,

you know, created experience?

So these two necklaces are by Elsa Schiaparelli.

They're from her Pagan Collection from 1938.

They're made of cellulose acetate.

In our collection, we often didn't see it as sort

of imitation tortoise shell,

but Schiaparelli sort

of recognized the creative potential of it.

So with a lot of her collections, we see it being used

just as like basically a clear plastic.

When it was originally worn, it would appear

as if the insects were sort

of resting directly on the wearer's skin.

Schiaparelli was often collaborating with surrealists

and I think as a designer,

she was sort of a surrealist herself.

Cellulose acetate starts to degrade after about 50 years,

and I think at this point, these are about 80 years old.

We always try to aim for it to look seamless,

as if it didn't take any time at all.

But it takes a full year from beginning to end really

in terms of the conceptualization of the exhibition

to the final realization within the galleries.

We've been working on dressing for the show itself

for maybe a month now.

This took a few hours.

There's a piece of hard plastic,

that's the mannequin itself.

That's kind of a ring that's attached to the back,

but this sort of soft part of the ruff wouldn't stay up.

So it has this clear piece of plastic underneath.

And then there's a few little empty pins, which are pins

that are used for like taxidermy and butterflies.

So they're really thin.

That was maybe three or four hours of my day last week

was just getting this looking nice

but it's worth it 'cause I love Westwood.

We don't do any alterations to the art objects.

We really wanna have them stay in the same condition

that they were in the whole time.

So because of that, we will not be doing any sort

of alterations to the garments to fit the mannequins.

Instead, what we'll do is make modifications

to our mannequins in order to display the dresses.

It's taken months to actually get the mannequins

to that state.

Creating garments that look like specimens in a bell jar.

[tranquil music]

Fashion is such an important part of our artistic output

that it's significant for The Met to collect it,

to preserve it, to make sure that it can be appreciated

by many generations moving forward.

It's also important that fashion is being integrated as part

of an overall story about cultural development

and of artistic dialogues

that can happen here in this great institution.

[lively music]

The museum is definitely a celebration of the real,

especially also the Met Gala

and that context is also a celebration.

It's a celebration of fashion, it's a celebration

of the arts in the broadest sense.

It's also a celebration of communities,

especially with the communities here in New York.

I've always been quite reluctant

to include technology actually within exhibitions

because I want people to focus

on the actual clothing as artworks.

But in this particular case,

it's how do we direct visitors' gaze

and make that sense of sight heightened

and how do we amplify that?

[pensive music] [rustling sounds]

It's just keeping your eyes open

and your your heart open in a way

so that you're always, always open to ideas

and open to change, and open to progress

and open to different ways of seeing the world.

I think it's really important that just have your eyes

as open as possible.

[tranquil music] [light clicking]

[tranquil music continues]