Inside The Met Exhibition - Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion | Vogue

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 [Music] [Laughter] [Music] 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 9 or 10 asking a security guard you know why can't I touch this which is a completely normal question for a 99-year-old and the museum context the young children tryed to deconstruct museum EA to make it more accessible to a younger [Music] audience in a way this was the most ambitious show we've done because narrative and interpretation is really what a curator does um but try to try to try and sort of resurrect and reawaken garments in our in our care there something that has been um you know challenging in terms of trying to control Notions of preservation and conservation but still keeping um an ACC accessibility a sensorial access to garments fashion is such a living art form and when a garment enters the collection it status changes irrevocably it can't be worn it can't be smelled 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 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 want to display this so This fortuni 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 so this is an example of in process detective work yeah you got to kind of get up close and personal with the object figure out what's safe about it what's not this is our other inherent Vice right 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 she's not going out and partying tonight she's had a l 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 it's in a sort of sleep mode it's it's sleeping temporarily in 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 and it wear clothing is 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 so a little bit ironic that you know we're creating these digital repres 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 scaparelli they're from her Pagan collection from 1938 they're made of cellulous acetate in our collection we often see it as sort of imitation tortois shell but scaparelli 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 scaparelli was often collaborating with surrealist and I think as a designer she was sort of a surrealist herself salus acetate starts theg grade 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 and beginning to end really in terms of the conceptualization of the exhibition to the final realization within the galleries we've been working on dress in 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 rough wouldn't stay up so it has this clear piece of plastic underneath and then there's a few little empti 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 because I love Westwood we don't do any alterations to the the art objects we really want to have them uh 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 to that state creating garments that look like specimens NE [Music] Bel 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 the museum is definitely a celebration of the real especially also the Met Gala in that context is also a celebration it's a celebration of fashion it's a celebration of the Arts in a broadest sense it's also a celebration of communities especially all the communities here in New York I've always been quite reluctant to to include technology actually with in 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 [Music] that 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 really important that just to have your eyes as open as possible [Music]

Channel: Vogue

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Keywords: andrew bolton, inside the exhibition, met gala, met gala 2024, met gala 2024 theme, met gala museum, met gala theme, met museum, metgala24, sleeping beauties: reawakening fashion, vogue, vogue met gala, vogue met gala museum

Id: 9gLiaaKRiJ0

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024