← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
'Sleeping Beauties' at the Met
00:23:37
The latest exhibit at the Met's Costume Institute brings pieces of fashion to life through innovative techniques, including holograms.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Today is the final day to see the unique presentation of what the Met calls the masterworks of its Costume Institute archive. The exhibit is called Sleeping Reawakening Fashion, and it displays more than 200 pieces from the Costume Institute's collection. Some of the dresses are so old and fragile that they can't be placed on a mannequin. Instead, they are laid out behind glass with their decaying beauty for us to see. Now, just seeing these intrinsically stitched fabrics might have been enough for viewers, but this exhibit does something new with the old. Thanks to AI and science, visitors to the exhibition can see the dresses in action. For example, on holograms, these sleeping beauties are reawakened by not some handsome prince, but by technology. The exhibit takes us from the extraordinary embroidery of 1615 all the way to 3D printing. I spoke this summer about the show with Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Met. Andrew and I started by discussing the title of the show. One of the first pieces you see when you walk into the exhibit invites us to understand the term Sleeping Beauty. It's a dress from around 1887 by Charles Frederick Worth, and we're told it has inherent vice. So I asked Andrew what inherent vice means and why the dress has it.
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Andrew Bolton
Yeah, it sounds like a movie, doesn't it? But inherent vice, it's a quality that's intrinsic to an artwork that is the very cause of its ruin. So it's kind of a form of built in destruction. And this particular dress by Charles Frederick Worth that was owned by Carrie Aster, who was the daughter of the Mrs. Aster from the Gilded Age. And it has something called warp loss, which means the fact that the warp threads are deteriorating and the weft threads are remaining. And it's very typical of Worth garments from the late 19th century. But it means the fact that we can't actually dress it on a dress form. We only can display it flat, so visitors can't get a sense of the silhouette and the dimensionality, how it was actually worn on the body. So we've tried to use Technology to, in this particular case, resurrect it rather than reawaken it to bring it back to life so visitors can get a better sense of what the silhouette was and how it moved in reality.
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Alison Stewart
You mention that because we get to see an image of that dress, but it's a hologram, and it's on the figure and it's dancing in the dress. How are you able to create an image of the dress? And why was it important to see the dress in action?
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Andrew Bolton
It was. Yes. Well, it's a ball gown, so it was important that we showed the context in which it was worn and how it would have been performed, so to speak, which would have been in Mrs. Astor's ballroom. Just so you get a sense of how the garment moved in time and space, I suppose, in a way, but it seemed a very simple task to begin with. But the whole process took about kind of like, golly, I would say, about six months to actually realize that Pepper's Ghost, because we had to do a pattern of the dress, then we had to digitize the dress, then we had to try and capture the materiality of the dress. And I think that that probably was the most difficult in terms of showing how it's made out of douche satin with chiffon sleeves and chiffon sort of details, and trying to get the dress moving in the way it would have been worn was probably the most difficult. So actually, getting the accuracy of the materiality, I think, was the most complicated in. In trying to bring that. The garment back to life.
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Alison Stewart
As we're thinking about inherent vice, as we see various dresses laid and sort.
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Of laid just out, they laid out on their sides.
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When you first started thinking about the.
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Exhibit, how many pieces with inherent vice were you able to include?
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Andrew Bolton
Well, we have. Sadly, we do have rather a lot in our collection. Our collection is made up of about 35,000 pieces of both gone and accessories. So it's a. You know, it's an extensive collection. And unfortunately, there are several garments that do that are suffering from inherent vice from various. Various sort of capacities. Sometimes the inherent vice coming from the material, coming from the construction of the garment, sometimes it's coming from the. The decoration, the ornamentation. So it varies depending on. On the actual garment itself. But what we wanted to do for the exhibition, because the through line for the show is nature. So the idea of the natural environment connects all of the case studies in the. In the exhibition, and the idea that the Met has an extraordinary collection that's inspired by the natural world. So There's a rich. A rich source of material to choose from. But it was mainly the fact that we wanted to show how nature is this sort of broader metaphor for fashion. The idea that fragility and the ephemerality fashion, it's obsolescence, but also the idea of rebirth and renewal. So nature became this overarching metaphor for the entire exhibition.
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Alison Stewart
My guest, Andrew Bolton, he's curator in charge at the Costume Institute at the Met. We're talking about sleeping beauties reawakening. Fashion is up through September 2nd. So we talked about. The image of the hologram on the dress is not the only time that technology enters the foray. AI appears at the show at the very end in a stunning bridal gown with a satin mermaid like train that goes down, I think, seven steps. And it belonged to a New York socialite named Natalie porter in the 1930s. And now through a QR code, I can ask Natalie a question about her wedding. What kind of questions can I ask Natalie?
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Andrew Bolton
You can ask. I mean, we wanted to. You know, I think one of the sort of frustrations that visitors often find within, not just within costume exhibitions, but exhibitions in general is how passive the objects are. So we wanted in a way to engage an object in an actual conversation with the viewer. So we used a sort of custom version of ChatGPT where you can ask her anything about her marriage, who she got married to, who designed a wedding dress, what it's made out of, how the dress ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the times in which she lived. So it was a way, in a way of creating more context for the dress and to allow visitors to engage in a more dynamic conversation with an object.
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Alison Stewart
I want to ask you about the blurbs on the wall because the typeface is very simple, I think. It's new Romans, I think. And the paragraphs on the wall describe the various segments, sometimes describing very detailed language dealing with. With fashion. Why did you choose such a simple text?
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Andrew Bolton
We wanted it to look almost like a typewriter font, so it looked like labels in a natural history museum. We wanted the show to be quite. The show tries to marry poetics and science and the poetics of fashion and the scientific elements of fashion. We felt that that typeface was a nice way of trying to engage visitors in making those sort of connections between poetry and sc. And we also work very closely with various scientists both within the Met and outside the Met to get some of the information that we wouldn't have garnered otherwise.
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Alison Stewart
So we talked about some of the sites, let's talk about the feel of the show. To walk through the exhibit, we go down a long hallway as sort of a single file hall situation. It undulates and you arrive at a circular room. And often the subject changes when you land in the room. Poppies are subject of one room, Beatles in one room, shells in another. And the experience repeats itself. What did you want to create with the way people experience the show and that sort of single file?
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Andrew Bolton
Yeah, it's sort of like. It's almost like a mini city when you walk into the space. And we work with the architects, Leong Leong. And in a way, what I wanted to create was a sort of like architectural representation of a molecule. So if you were to look above vertically, if you were to hover above the. It would look like a three dimensional molecule. And the idea was that when you walk through the space, the objects would be contained within the senses. So, you know, when a garment comes into the, into the Met's collection, its status is changed irrevocably. You can't smell it, you can't wear it, you can't touch it, you can't feel it, you can't hear it. So all the senses that in a way engages and enlivens fashion are denied visitors. When a garment enters a museum, your sense of sight is enhanced. You get a much better sense of the construction and the ornamentation of a garment. But the other sites are very much diminished. So the idea was to contain the themes within these sort of bell jars. In a way, when you walk into the space, they're like architectural bell jars. And the idea was in a way, to focus your attention on the garments, but also to focus your senses so that the bell jars in a way contained your senses and allowed you to engage with them in a more intimate and a more personal way.
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Alison Stewart
Sometimes you were encouraged to feel the walls. What did you hope people would get from the feeling of the walls?
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Andrew Bolton
Yeah, it was, I think touch probably is one of the most. The senses that is the most diminished within a museum because fashion is all about touch and the way it feels against your body, the materiality of clothing. So really touch, the tactility of fashion is really, really one of the most compromised senses that you. That that happens within the museum. And obviously you can't actually touch the garments themselves. But we wanted to recreate the embroidery of some of the garments. So in one room we have an incredible Jacobean waistcoat worn by a young girl. And the embroidery during this period, it was very dimensional, very dynamic. So we actually Worked very closely with our educational department, and we created a wallpaper, a touch wallpaper, that was to the exact of braille, that people could actually touch. So you get a sense of the dimensionality of the embroidery of the Elizabethan bodice. And another example, there's a wonderful dress that was created by Christian Dior in 1949 called Ms. Dior, and it was used in part to really as a vehicle to market their scent. Ms. Dior. And it's comprised of hundreds of flowers. Mille fleur embroidery is what it's called. And we did a 3D printed version of a miniature version of Ms. Dior, so visitors could actually feel feel the silhouette of the Miss Dior dress, but also get a sense of the types of flowers that were used within the embroidery. So it's very much an idea. Even though you can't actually touch a dress, the idea is to sort of feel it with your hands, but also feel it with your emotion and feel it with your mind as well.
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Alison Stewart
As you go through the exhibition Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion, you hear all kinds of sounds. We're moving on to sound now, and one you hear is the scroop. You sometimes even I think you hear it before really understanding what it means.
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First of all, what's a scroop?
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Andrew Bolton
Well, scroop, it's a combination of the word scrape and whoop, and it's the specific sound that silk makes. Silk has this very specific sound, and depending on the way it's finished, you can have either a louder or a softer type of scrupe. Taffeta is the loudest silk because the way it's finished, it has a very distinct sort of crisp feeling to it. So we actually worked in an anechoic chamber in Billingham University. An anechoic chamber is a room without any echoes or electromagnetic waves. So you're hearing the sound in its purest form. So it actually sounds like it's static. It's not exactly how you would imagine how taphta sounds in reality, because it has none of the echoes that you hear surrounding taffeta within a room context. So that's what you hear. You're walking through the room and you're hearing literally the sound of taffeta. And in French, it's called frou frou, which is a much prettier word than sc.
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Alison Stewart
We've gotten to smell. There are small vials and pipes that allow viewers to smell scents. Sometimes it's floral, sometimes it's the scent.
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Of a dress or of a hat.
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What was the process, you know, sort of layman's terms of creating the smell.
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Of a hat or a dress.
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Andrew Bolton
I think this is probably one of the most sort of popular and certainly the most sort of compelling aspect of the exhibition. We work with a smell artist called Cecil Tolus. And Cecil has developed this apparatus that had. Allows you to capture the smell molecules of a garment or of an accessory. So she was able to capture thousands of smell molecules from, say, one particular hat or one particular dress, and she was able to replicate them. So you're actually smelling the olfactory history of a dress or an accessory. So you're smelling the perfume that the wearer wore. You're smelling the environment in which she lived in, what she ate, what she drank, where she lived. So it's an extraordinary sort of tool in a way. We wanted to go beyond the idea of just how you would expect a garment to smell and show how you actually smell and capture the actual olfactory history of the garment. So in a way, it's capturing the very particular and personal smellscapes of a garment worn by the wearer.
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Alison Stewart
Now, with all that interaction, people get close to the art. How did you decide on the gentle yet firm voice that says, you are getting too close to the art?
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Andrew Bolton
I know it seems to be, it seems to go against the idea for the show, doesn't it, where you're, you're encouraging people to have these very personal and very intimate connections to the objects. But at the same time, one of our priorities is obviously the safeguarding of the garments. And, you know, when. I know that when a garment comes into the museum, it's senses are diminished. But at the same time, you know, we're able to keep it alive much longer because of the way we conserve it, the way we preserve it, where we store it. So we want to. Even the word curate means to care for and to look after garments. So even though some of our senses are diminished, we do expand the lifespan of the garment by allowing people not to touch them and to preserve them and for posterity.
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Alison Stewart
The show is not linear. You know, there are 21st century avant garde clothing made of shells next to 18th century ball gowns. Why did you choose not to go in a linear fashion?
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Andrew Bolton
I think there was another, another aspect of this show in terms of, you know, we're trying to reawaken costumes through the senses, but another way of reawakening the garments and the, the costumes and the accessories is through interpretation. So it's important for us to juxtapose historical and contemporary garments side by side. I always feel that there's a sort of frisson, a sort of. I know. Spark that happens when you have a historical garment next to a contemporary garment. The sort of historical garment informs the contemporary, and the contemporary enlivens historical. So it's important to show how through interpretation and through. Sometimes directly. So the garment we mentioned earlier, which was the Charles Frederick Worth ball gown, the designer Alexander Michele from Gucci, was actually inspired directly by that garment to create a cape. So we have the cape next to the Sleeping Beauty, which is lying flat, to show how, as well as reawakening it literally, we're also reawakening it conceptually through interpretation and. Yeah, through analysis.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. The one thing that caught my attention was a British shirt jacket from 1615 next to a Karl Lagerfeld dress. And the jacket is just bursting with images from the garden, hummingbirds and flowers. And next to it is Lagerfeld's take on the design. What impresses you about that jacket and its craftsmanship from the 17th century?
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Andrew Bolton
That's one of my favorites too, I think.
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Alison Stewart
Oh, is.
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Andrew Bolton
It's lovely. And Cole was directly, again, inspired by that. That period of embroidery for that particular garment. I think what I love about that, the. The. The bodice, the waistcoat born by the. The young girl was it. It is. It very much captures that moment in English embroidery in particular, which is. Which was incredibly dimensional. So when you look at it, you actually seeing pea pods opening, strawberries, birds snatching at dragonflies. And we try to capture the sort of dynamism of that with a projection. So when you walk into space above the waistcoat and above Carl's piece, is a projection of the embroidery where the birds are moving, the pea pods are opening, the strawberries are ripening. Because part of the idea of the embroidery, apart from the dimensionality of that embroidery, was the dynamism as well. And we also worked with a sound artist to capture these macro sounds of insects. You hear a caterpillar literally crawling across a leaf. You're hearing a dragonfly's wings. So they're these macro sounds from nature that have this very abstract, very sort of very odd sort of sound. It's not exactly how you magnify them to sound, but they are literally how a caterpillar sounds walking across a leaf.
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Alison Stewart
We get to the section, the garden, it's got a lot to see, the sort of double floors of yellow gowns on one wal. And yellow is kind of an unappreciated color. Why is yellow such a misunderstood color?
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Andrew Bolton
I think it's sort of, you know, it was a very difficult color to replicate when we actual dyes, most of yellow came from a plant called Weld, which actually has a yellow flower. It actually came from the plant rather than the flower itself. But it created a very vibrant, very vibrant yellow. I suppose it's sort of, you know, at one point, you know, if it's a very sunflower yellow, it has. It. It denotes happiness. But on the other side, when it's a murky yellow, it's melancholia. So in a way, it captures the full spectrum of one's emotions and again, was a very difficult color to achieve. And we work very closely with our Department of Scientific Conservation to analyze all of those garments to find out which was made out of natural dyes and which was made out of synthetic dyes.
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Alison Stewart
And on the other side is a jacket sewn by Loewe, and it's covered in grass seed. And behind it is a video showing time lapse of the grass sort of taking over the jacket. When you think about this piece, what does this piece say to you about consumption?
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Andrew Bolton
Well, you know, in a way, it. That that coat is the sort of. I don't know, the. The sort of emblem for the whole exhibition. This idea of fashion being about constantly. It's ephemeral, you know, it's constantly changing, it's constantly renewing itself. It's constantly giving new ideas and different types of. Of rebirths. So I felt that in a way, you have the. The garment died during the duration of the exhibition. So it started off fresh and green. What it actually is is it's a variety of seeds, chia seeds, oat grass, that the roots are embedded into the wool and it grows from the actual wool. And it takes about 20 weeks to grow. And then obviously, if it's not watered and looked after, it does. It does dry and finally die. So in a way, it was this sort of who and captured the essence of the exhibition and this idea of the ephemerality, but also notions of the obsolescence of fashion at the same time, but also ideas of rebirth and renewal and also cyclicity, in a way. And so it was this ultimate metaphor for fashion. And I felt that coat really summed it up.
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Alison Stewart
Many of the people know that this exhibit has a relationship to the Met Gala. The theme was the Garden of Time by JG Ballard, where this garden is plucked down to its final flower. How do you think the theme relates to the show?
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Andrew Bolton
I thought they did such a good job this time, Alice and all the Guests, I felt that they really read the short story. Anna, going forward, all of our sort of dress code should be based on a short story. It'd be the book reading club. But they really read. The guests really read it. And they interpret it in such different ways. So sometimes some guests really focused on the idea of flowers and foliates in terms of patterns. Others really focused on the idea of sleeping beach. So this idea of garments that do deteriorate, other. Other people resurrected garments from their wardrobe, vintage pieces. Some even came as sort of the actual aristocrats who turned themselves into sculptures. So you've got the whole range of interpretations from the short story. And I felt as if. Yeah, I felt this was one of the most successful sort of interpretations of the dress code.
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Alison Stewart
I always ask one place you'd like someone to spend just an extra five seconds. Someplace in the show where you want somebody to just spend a little extra time.
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Andrew Bolton
It might be in the section which focuses on swallows. There's a jacket in there that was made by Alexander McQueen that was directly inspired by Hitchcock's the Bird. And it's the orange jacket that's been screen printed with swallows. And the actual video that that surrounds the garment is sort of very much inspired by Hitchcock's the Burbs. And we were able to trace the actual sound that Hitchcock's used in an archive in Berlin. So what you're hearing is the exact sort of sound that that Hitchcock used in the film, and that sense of fear as well. You know, you start off with one bird and two birds and three birds, and the whole room is then swarmed with these, with flying birds, and it goes dark and it ends in feathers. So part of the show is about reawakening particular senses, but it's also to engage your emotions, going from sort of happiness and joy in the garden, perhaps, and then going to fear and anxiety, I suppose, in the bird section. So the show is about the senses. It's also about deploying one's emotions to and connect with the scent, with the rooms, and with the garments, emotionally as well as sensorially.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the exhibition is Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion. It's up through September 2nd. You can see it at the Met. My guest has been Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Met. Thank you so much for your time today.
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Andrew Bolton
Thank you so much, Alison.
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Alison Stewart
And that is all of it for today. Here's a preview of tomorrow's show. We're kicking off our Get Political Election series, focusing on political history books. I'll speak with with Brown Professor Corey Britt Schneider about his new book, the Presidents and the Five Leaders who Threaten Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. And we'll also brainstorm ideas about decorating apartments on a budget. Of course we want your suggestions. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I hope you have a great rest of your holiday weekend, and I'll meet you back here tomorrow.
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