Inside The Exhibition: Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion

Vogue

Inside The Exhibition: Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion Director: Catherine Orchard Director of Photography: Mike Lopez Editor: Estan Esparza Producer: Gabrielle Reich Producer, On Set: Kevyn Fairchild Associate Producers: Lea Donenberg, Jazz Pitcairn Assistant Camera: Pierce Pyrzenski, Eliza Kamerling-Brown Gaffer: Billy Voermann Audio: Lily Van Leeuwen, Gabe Quiroga Groomers: Laila Hayani, Jessi Butterfield Assistant Editor: Andy Morell Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch Production Coordinators: Ava Kashar, Bailey Lica Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors Line Producer: Romeeka Powell Senior Director, Production Management: Jessica Schier Director of Content, Production: Rahel Gebreyes Senior Director, Programming, Vogue: Linda Gittleson VP, Digital Video English: Thespena Guatieri Special Thanks: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Transcript

00:00People in the 18th and 19th century, they could actually control the sound of their clothing

00:04and it was part of the art form of fashion was to control how your garment sounds.

00:30Sleeping Beauties is a collection-based exhibition, so it's focusing on our permanent collection

00:45and the idea is to reawaken garments in our collection through the senses.

00:51I heard a young girl, probably nine or ten, asking a security guard, you know, why can't

00:56I touch this?

00:57It's a completely normal question for a nine-year-old in a museum context.

01:01The young children try to deconstruct museum etiquette and make it more accessible to a

01:06younger audience.

01:07In a way, this was the most ambitious show we've done because narrative and interpretation

01:13is really what a curator does, but to try and sort of resurrect and reawaken garments

01:20in our care is something that has been, you know, challenging in terms of trying to control

01:25notions of preservation and conservation but still keeping an accessibility, a sensorial

01:31access to garments.

01:35Fashion is such a living art form and when a garment enters the collection, its status

01:39changes irrevocably.

01:40It can't be worn, it can't be smelt, it can't be heard, it can't be touched.

01:45And in the exhibition, some garments are so fragile that they can't even be worn on a

01:49mannequin so they're lying flat in the exhibition.

01:51We've thought of ways to try and reawaken the three-dimensionality of those garments.

01:56The reason that this piece was selected to be a Sleeping Beauty is because of its inherent

02:01vice.

02:02This is a quality of an object, whether it's relating to its materials or its construction

02:09that is inherent to the object but causes it to degrade over time.

02:14So the inherent vice in this garment in particular is the weighted silk that the entire piece

02:20is constructed out of.

02:22It's almost like their last gasp of being seen by the public.

02:26So we're constantly trying to balance that display of these objects.

02:33Sometimes it's the mundane, the rolling of tissue that becomes a very specialized skill

02:38that people often don't think about.

02:40Like we're good at crafting out of paper because of the unusual objects that come our way.

02:46We're working on sort of a proof of concept on how we want to display this.

02:50So this Fortuny gown has all kinds of tension going on with it with the pleats and we want

02:56it to lay nice and flat, but it also has a lot of splits and everything.

03:00So we need to be able to support that.

03:02So this is an example of our in-process detective work.

03:06Yeah, you've got to kind of get up close and personal with the object, figure out what's

03:10safe about it, what's not.

03:11This is our other inherent vice, right, where these heavy beads are contrasting against

03:17this very light silk that will pull on it, and if it was on a mannequin could change

03:23the shape of the garment.

03:25She's not going out and partying tonight.

03:29She's had a life.

03:33Part of the role of a curator and a conservator is obviously to preserve and conserve the

03:38garment.

03:39When we acquire the garment, we store it in a humidity and temperature controlled environment,

03:44limited lighting.

03:45So in a way, it's in a sort of sleep mode.

03:48It's sleeping temporarily in our storeroom.

03:51And part of our job is to reawaken them, to preserve, but it's also to showcase and also

03:56to showcase the original intention of that particular garment, which is to smell it.

04:02It is to touch it.

04:03It is to hear it.

04:10In a way, clothing is like a fingerprint.

04:12We've got rose hats, lilac hats, carnations, and you expect to smell a rose or a carnation,

04:17but you're really smelling is all of the people, the person who wore it, but also the people

04:22who handled it all over the years.

04:23So it really is a sort of life history, a smellscape of a garment or an accessory.

04:29It's a little bit ironic that, you know, we're creating these digital representations of

04:37objects to preserve them, but it's sort of at the cost of preserving the physical object.

04:43So that's something that you really have to think about.

04:46What serves the public interest more?

04:49Preserving the physical object or having people have the different or more intimate relationship

04:55with the object through some, you know, created experience.

04:59So these two necklaces are by Elsa Schiaparelli.

05:05They're from her pagan collection from 1938.

05:09They're made of cellulose acetate.

05:11In our collection, we often see it as sort of imitation tortoiseshell, but Schiaparelli

05:16sort of recognized the creative potential of it.

05:18So with a lot of her collections, we see it being used just as like basically a clear plastic.

05:23When it was originally worn, it would appear as if the insects were sort of resting directly

05:28on the wearer's skin.

05:29Schiaparelli was often collaborating with surrealists, and I think as a designer, she

05:34was sort of a surrealist herself.

05:36Cellulose acetate starts to degrade after about 50 years, and I think at this point,

05:41these are about 80 years old.

05:44We always try to aim for it to look seamless, as if it didn't take any time at all, but

05:48it takes a full year from beginning to end, really, in terms of the conceptualization

05:52of the exhibition to the final realization within the galleries.

05:56We've been working on dressing for the show itself for maybe a month now.

06:04This took a few hours.

06:06There's a piece of hard plastic that's the mannequin itself.

06:10That's kind of a ring that's attached to the back, but this sort of soft part of the ruff

06:16wouldn't stay up, so it has this clear piece of plastic underneath, and then there's a

06:22few little anti-pins, which are pins that are used for like taxidermying butterflies,

06:28so they're really thin.

06:29That was maybe three or four hours of my day last week, was just getting this looking

06:34nice, but it's worth it, because I love Westwood.

06:38We don't do any alterations to the art objects.

06:41We really want to have them stay in the same condition that they were in the whole time,

06:46so because of that, we will not be doing any sort of alterations to the garments to fit

06:50the mannequins.

06:51Instead, what we'll do is make modifications to our mannequins in order to display the

06:56dresses.

06:58It's taken months to actually get the mannequins to that state, creating garments that look

07:03like specimens in a bell jar.

07:11Fashion is such an important part of our artistic output, that it's significant for the Met

07:16to collect it, to preserve it, to make sure that it can be appreciated by many generations

07:22moving forward.

07:23It's also important that fashion is being integrated as part of an overall story about

07:27cultural development and of artistic dialogues that can happen here in this great institution.

07:40The museum is definitely a celebration of the real, especially also the Met Gala.

07:43In that context, it's also a celebration.

07:46It's a celebration of fashion.

07:48It's a celebration of the arts in the broader sense.

07:50It's also a celebration of communities, especially all the communities here in New York.

07:56I've always been quite reluctant to include technology actually within exhibitions because

08:00I want people to focus on the actual clothing as artworks, but in this particular case,

08:05it's how do we direct visitors' gaze and make that sense of sight heightened, and how do

08:12we amplify that.

08:14It's just keeping your eyes open and your heart open in a way, so that you're always,

08:20always open to ideas and open to change and open to progress and open to different ways

08:24of seeing the world.

08:25I think it's really important to just have your eyes as open as possible.

08:43I think it's really important to just have your eyes as open as possible.

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