Sure, she was a royal princess and all. But there’s no way Sleeping Beauty — either before or after her nap — ever had quite the fabulous wardrobe that’s been assembled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” the spring Costume Institute exhibit that debuts at Monday’s Met Gala, is not technically about THAT Sleeping Beauty. The title’s nod to the fairytale is actually a reference to the glass coffins — “let’s be more upbeat and call them cases,” quips curator Andrew Bolton — that hold 16 aging garments now so fragile that they can’t be shown upright. These delicate creatures have been slumbering, like Aurora herself, in the museum’s climate-controlled archives.
But these “beauties” are only a small fraction of the 220 items on display in the nature themed “Sleeping Beauties,” which Bolton calls one of the institute’s most ambitious shows yet (his previous blockbusters include “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” and “China: Through the Looking Glass”). It’s also special to Bolton because every item on display is from the museum’s own collection.
Another key difference: This show will be a multisensory experience, involving not just sight but smell, sound and touch. Organized into themes of earth, air and water, the show makes use of a “smell artist” who extracted and analyzed molecules from clothing, creating scents visitors can now sniff from plastic tubes. Curators have also captured sounds of fabrics in an echo-free chamber and used 3D scans to replicate embroidery patterns for touching.
Despite the scale, “I really wanted to make this intimate and participatory,” Bolton said during a weekend tour through the show. In fact, there’s even a mannequin in a gown you can text a question to, and she’ll deliver a ChatGPT-enabled response.
Another key difference: This show will be a multisensory experience, involving not just sight but smell, sound and touch. Organized into themes of earth, air and water, the show makes use of a “smell artist” who extracted and analyzed molecules from clothing, creating scents visitors can now sniff from plastic tubes. Curators have also captured sounds of fabrics in an echo-free chamber and used 3D scans to replicate embroidery patterns for touching.
Read full story at The Associated Press.
