The Exhibition
I tried to describe the theme and meaning behind this new opening, but I just couldn’t seem to explain it as well as Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge, and his team does at the beginning of the exhibition. They set the scene for the viewers by saying that:
“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 a lifeless work of art that can no longer be worn, heard, touched, or smelled. Sleeping Beauties: reawakening fashion endeavours to resuscitate garments from the collection by reactivating their sensory qualities and reengaging our sensorial perceptions. With its cross-sensory offerings, the exhibition aims to extend the interpretation of fashion within museums from the merely visual to the multisensory and participatory, encouraging personal connections.
The galleries unfold as a series of case studies united by the theme of nature. Motifs such as flowers and foliage, birds and insects, and fish and shells are organized into three groupings: earth, air, and water, respectively. In many ways, nature serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion – its rebirth, renewal, and cyclicity as well as its transience, ephemerality, and evanescence.
Sleep is an essential salve for a garment’s well-being and survival, but as in life, it requires a suspension of the senses that equivocates between life and death. The exhibition despite being destined for an eternal slumber safely within the museum’s walls – do not forget their sensory histories. Indeed, these histories are embedded within the very fibres of their being, and simply require reactivation through the mind and body, heart, and soul of those willing to dream and imagine.”
The exhibition is split into different sections, which are all defined by different themes of nature; fragile nature of nature, floral imagery, Dior’s garden, Van Gough’s Flowers, Poppies, Garthwaite’s garden, the red rose, the spectre of the rose, scent of a man, Reseda Luteola, Garden life, beetle wings, spiders, the birds, the nightingale and the rose, marine life, Venus, seashells, snakes, and the mermaid.
The exhibition starts with a highlight to the fragile nature of each “sleeping beauty”, with spotlights moving in and out of focus to ensure no further damage happens to the weak garments. During this, “The Sleeping Beauty, Op. 66” (1889), composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, is being played. One of my favourite pieces in this collection was a cape created by Alessandro Michele, whilst he worked at Gucci, which was described as ‘seafoam silk satin embroidered with polychrome plastic sequins, plastic pearls, clear glass crystals, black glass bulge beads, and bronze glass seed beads in the pattern of a dove, a cloud, and flowers’.
Floral imagery was the most popular source of patterning for dress in the eighteenth century, revealing the era’s penchant for Orientalism. Similarly, under the flower theme there was blurred blossoms, which is a more muted version of the painted flower. My favorutie piece was from an unknown French designer (1957), and it was a bandeau ballgown with bows down the back of the dress, in a pink and green rose warp print bleu background design.
Dior’s garden was my favourite section. With a 4D experience, where you could touch the wall surrounding the dress, as it was designed to be made from the same material.
A great interactive experience was shown through “The Red Rose”. The exhibition described this segment.
““Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” In this tautological line from her 1913 poem “Sacred Emily” Gertrude Stein materializes the red rose through repetition, giving it form, shape, and substance. There are few flowers that have been more lauded by poets and painters than a red rose, which has been invoked as a symbol of love, beauty, romance, passion, and sexuality. The rose has been equally embrace by designers, as represented here by garments that are sartorial sonnets and sculptures in and of themselves.
Phillip Treacy’s startingly lifelike headpiece evokes the flower’s fragility, as visualised in the animation and as also realised in the “sleeping beauty,’ whose smell molecules, along with those of Yves Saint Laurent’s evening dress, emanate from the tubes on the wall. Saint Laurent’s lyrical confection as well as Pierpaolo Piccioli’s pay homage to their respective houses’ founders, who both shared a passion for roses and the colour red.
For Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, roses hold personal memories. For Dolce, they remind him of the Palermo Botanical Garden and for Gabbana, they recall his mother, who wore red lipstick infused with the flower’s smell.”
When you enter this part, you are faced with a glass dome with a rose instead, sleeping beauty esque, and a moving digital rose above on the ceiling. Your eyes are then taken to a beautiful dress designed by House of Lanvin in 1889, which is a dress with beige silk tulle embroidered with red ombre silk plain weave ribbon and red ombre silk plain weave ribbon rosettes. The garments within this section had been reawakened by smell. There were tubes that connected to each dress, and each smell molecule was recreated so that the guest could imagine what the dress would have smelt like.
This exhibition is like no other, and is definitely worth a visit before it shuts on September 2nd 2024. Especially of you want to hear and see about all the other sections…
