Some of the garments at the Met’s spring 2024 show could not be hung on a mannequin at all. They were too fragile, so curators laid them flat in cases scattered through the galleries. That is where the exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” got its name. It ran at the Costume Institute from May 10 to September 2 and held 250 objects from the museum’s collection.
Nature gave the show its structure. Objects were grouped in three sections, earth, air and water. Designers on view included Loewe, Charles Worth, Mary Katrantzou, Dior, Rodarte, Alexander McQueen and Maison Martin Margiela.
More than something to look at
Visitors could touch, too. The embroidery of select garments was embossed into the gallery walls. SHOWstudio and creative consultant Nick Knight supplied digital artwork and other technology-driven displays, among them 3D-printed replicas of garments.
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute, said that once clothing enters a museum collection it becomes “a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled.” The exhibition tried to reverse that. Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said it would invite visitors to experience what a garment felt, sounded and smelled like when it could still be worn.
The smell of old dresses
The smell was real. Scent artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas spent more than a year working in labs on the Costume Institute archives, collecting the molecules that garments give off. She traced them from up to 100 items.
Her method: a microfilter in a glass barrel with a battery-powered pump pulled air from a garment for one to two hours. With support from Symrise, the samples went through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry so the compounds could be identified and recreated.
Ten overlapping molecules from a 1958 Dior “Rose Rouge” evening dress and a 1923 Lanvin “Roseraie” evening dress were shown in test tubes. Smells from a 1913 “Rose d’Iribe” day dress worn by Denise Poiret and a 1913 House of Drecoll silk dress were applied as scented paint on the wall opposite. A section on heiress Millicent Rogers used six molecules found in her clothes, including a 1938 Schiaparelli evening dress.
“All the molecules are real molecules found in the various items,” Tolaas said. “What you are smelling is not fake.”
