Title: 'Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion' Brings Old Pieces to Life at the Met [MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The exhibit Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion has more than 250 pieces (CORRECTION: 220 pieces) from the Met's Costume Institute's archive, and it does something new with the old. Some of the dresses are so fragile that they cannot be put on a mannequin. Instead, they are laid out behind glass with their decaying beauty for us to see. Now, that might have been enough, but hey, we live in the 21st century. Now AI and science are available so we can see the dresses in action, for example, on holograms. These sleeping beauties were reawakened not by a princess kiss, but by technology. The exhibit is organized into elements -- air, earth, water; land, sea and sky -- and take us from the extraordinary embroidery of 1615 to 3-D printing. Joining us now is Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the costume institute at the Met. Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion is on view through September 2. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Bolton: Thank you for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: The show is just an explosion of sights and sounds and smells, and we're going to talk about them, but let's talk about the title first. One of the first pieces you see in the show invites us to understand the term, "Sleeping Beauty." It's a piece addressed circa 1887 by Charles Frederick Worth. It's a dress laid out for us to see, and we're told it has inherent vice. First, please explain to us what inherent vice means and why the stress has it.

Andrew Bolton: It sounds like a movie, doesn't it? Inherent vice, it's a quality that's intrinsic to an artwork that is the very cause of its ruin. It's kind of a form of built-in destruction. This particular dress by Charles Frederick Worth, that was owned by Carrie Astor, who was the daughter of the Mrs. Astor 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. 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.

Visitors can't get a sense of the silhouette and the dimensionality, how it was actually worn on the body. We try 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.

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?

Andrew Bolton: Well, it's a ball gown. 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. It seemed a very simple task to begin with. The whole process took about, golly, I would say about six months to actually realize the pepper's ghost because we had to do pattern of the dress, then we had to digitize the dress. Then we had to try and capture the materiality of the dress.

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. Trying to get the dress moving in the way it would have been worn was probably the most difficult. Actually getting the accuracy of the materiality, I think, was the most complicated in trying to bring the garment back to life.

Alison Stewart: As we're thinking about inherent vice, as we see various dresses laid just out-- they laid out on their sides. When you first started thinking about the exhibit, how many pieces with inherent vice were you able to include?

Andrew Bolton: Sadly, we do have rather a lot in our collection. Our collection is made up of about 35,000 pieces of both garments and accessories. It's an extensive collection. Unfortunately, there are several garment that are suffering from inherent vice from various, various sort of capacities. Sometimes the inherent vice coming from the material, sometimes coming from the construction of the garment. Sometimes it's coming from the decoration, the ornamentation. It varies depending on the actual garment itself. What we wanted to do for the exhibition, because the through line for the show is nature. The idea of the natural environment connects all of the case studies in the exhibition. The Met has an extraordinary collection that's inspired by the natural world, so there's 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 its obsolescence, but also the idea of rebirth and renewal. Nature became this overarching metaphor for the entire exhibition.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Andrew Bolton, he's curator in charge at the Costume Institute at the Met. We are talking about Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. It's up through September 2. We talked about the image of the hologram on the dress. Its 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. It belonged to a New York socialite named Natalie Porter (Correction: Natalie Potter) in the 1930s. Now, through a QR code, I can ask Natalie a question about her wedding. What kind of questions can I ask Natalie?

Andrew Bolton: You can ask-- I think one of the frustrations that visitors often find, not just within costume exhibitions, but exhibitions in general, is how passive the objects are. We wanted, in a way, to engage an object in an actual conversation with the viewer. We used a custom version of ChatGPT where you can ask her anything about her marriage, who she got married to, who designed her 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. 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.

Alison Stewart: I wanted 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 fashion. Why did you choose such a simple text?

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 and we felt that that typeface was a nice way of trying to engage visitors in making those sort of connections between poetry and science. We also worked very closely with various scientists, both within the Met and outside the Met, to get some of the information that we wouldn't have gone at otherwise.

Alison Stewart: 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 the subject of one room, beetles 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?

Andrew Bolton: It's almost like a mini city when you walk into the space. We work with the Architect Leong Leong. In a way, what I wanted to create was a sort of architectural representation of a molecule. If you were to look above vertically, if you were to hover above it, it would look like a three-dimensional molecule. The idea was that when you walk through the space, the objects would be contained within the senses. When a garment comes into the Mets 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. All the senses, 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. 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. 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.

Alison Stewart: Sometimes you were encouraged to feel the walls. What did you hope people would get from the feeling of the walls?

Andrew Bolton: 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. Really, the tactility of fashion is really one of the most compromised senses that happens within the museum. Obviously, you can't actually touch the garments themselves, but we wanted to recreate the embroidery of some of the garments. In one room, we have an incredible Jacobean waistcoat worn by a young girl. The embroidery during this period, it was very dimensional, very dynamic.

We actually worked very closely with our educational department, and we created a touch wallpaper that was to the exact specifications of braille that people could actually touch so you get a sense of the dimensionality of the embroidery of the Elizabethan Bodice. Another example, there's a wonderful dress that was created by Christian Dior in 1949, called Miss Dior, and it was used in part as a vehicle to market their saint, Miss Dior, and it's comprised of hundreds of flowers. Mille Fleur embroidery is what it's called, and we did a 3-D printed version of a miniature version of Miss Dior so visitors could actually feel the silhouette of the Miss Dior dress, but also get a sense of the types of flowers that were used within the embroidery. It's very much an idea-- even though you can't actually touch the dress, the idea is to feel it with your hands, but also feel it with your emotion and feel it with your mind as well.

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. Sometimes even, I think you hear it before really understanding what it means. First of all, what's a scroop?

Andrew Bolton: Well, scroop it's a combination of the words 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, it can be loud. You can have either a louder or a softer type of scroop. Taffeta is the loudest silk because the way it's finished, it has a very distinct sort of crisp feeling to it. We actually worked in an anechoic chamber in Bellingham University. An anechoic chamber is a room without any echoes or electromagnetic waves, so you're hearing the sound in its purest form. It actually sounds like static. It's not exactly how you would imagine how it sounds in reality, because it has none of the echoes that you hear surrounding taffeta within a room context.

That's what you hear. You're walking through the room and you're hearing, literally, the sound of taffeta. In French, it's called frou-frou, which is a much prettier word than scroop.

Alison Stewart: You also share poems in one room devoted to the poppies and the various dresses that depict versions of the poppies you hear In Flanders Fields, read by Morgan Spector of The Gilded Age fame. Obviously this is about death and dying and I'm assuming about the award. Where else do we see fashion interpreting the cultural events of the time?

Andrew Bolton: That room in particular was important because we have various rooms devoted to the iconography of the natural world, particular flowers in this particular case, poppy. We were focusing on the symbolism and the iconography of poppies, which historically have always represented death, mortality, or blood. We had, as you said, Morgan Spector reading In Flanders Fields. We also had an animation by Nick Knight, the photographer and filmmaker, where he filmed a poppy and then created the illusion of it bleeding, which was also to connect to the symbolism of the poppy.

In another area, we have a wonderful necklace by Simon Costin, which was made out of-- It's actually a necklace, which it simulates rose thorns and taxidermy Nightingale almost sort of like sacrificed on the thorns. That piece was inspired by Oscar Wilde's short story The Nightingale and the Rose. We have Elizabeth Debicki reading an excerpt from that. Taxidermy, it was a very cruel vogue from the late 19th century, really, through to the mid-20th century, where birds were sacrificed in their millions for fashion. This particular garment is surrounded by an amphitheater of death, basically, of all these hats that have various levels of taxidermy.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Mets Costume Institute. We're discussing the exhibit Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. We'll have more with Andrew after a quick break. This is All If It.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's continue my conversation with Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Mets Costume Institute. We are speaking about the exhibit Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, which is on view through September 2.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

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 of a dress or a hat. What was the process, sort of layman's terms, of creating the smell of a hat or a dress.

Andrew Bolton: I think this is probably one of the most popular and certainly the most compelling aspects of the exhibition. We worked with a smell artist called Cecil Tollis, and Cecil has developed this apparatus that allows you to capture the smell molecules of a garment or an accessory. 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. You're actually smelling the olfactory history of a dress or an accessory. 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. It's an extraordinary 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. In a way, it's capturing the very particular and personal smell scapes of a garment worn by the wearer.

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're getting too close to the art"?

Andrew Bolton: I know. It seems to go against the idea for the show, doesn't it? Where you're encouraging people to have these very personal, very intimate connections to the objects. At the same time, one of our priorities is obviously the safeguarding of the garments. I know that when a garment comes into the museum, its senses are diminished, but at the same time, 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. Even the word, "Curate" means to care for and to look after garments.

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 for posterity.

Alison Stewart: The show is not linear. 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?

Andrew Bolton: I think there was another aspect of the show in terms of-- we're trying to reawaken costumes through the senses, but another way of reawakening the garments and the costumes and the accessories is through interpretation. It's important for us to juxtapose historical and contemporary garments side by side. I always feel that there's a sort of free song, a sort of-- I know spark that happens when you have historical garment next to a contemporary garment. The historical garment informs the contemporary, and the contemporary enlivens historical.

It's important to show how, through interpretation and sometimes directly. The garment we mentioned earlier, which was the Charles Frederick Worth ball gown, the designer Alessandro Michele from Gucci, was actually inspired directly by that garment to create a cape. 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 through analysis.

Alison Stewart: 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. Next to it is Lagerfeld's take on the design. What impresses you about that jacket and its craftsmanship from the 17th century?

Andrew Bolton: That's one of my favourites too. I think it is lovely. Karl was directly, again, inspired by that period of embroidery for that particular garment. I think what I love about the bodice, the waistcoat worn by the young girl, it very much captures that moment in English embroidery in particular, which was incredibly dimensional. When you look at it, you actually see peapods opening, strawberries ripening, birds snatching at dragonflies. We try to capture the dynamism of that with a projection. When you walk into space above the waistcoat and above Karl's piece is a projection of the embroidery where the birds are moving, the peapods are opening, the strawberries are ripening.

Because part of the idea of the embroidery, apart from the dimensionality of that embroidery, was a dynamism as well. We also work 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. They're these macro sounds from nature that have this very abstract, it's a very odd sort of sound. It's not exactly how you imagine them to sound, but they are literally how a caterpillar sounds walking across a leaf.

Alison Stewart: We get to the section, the garden. It's got a lot to see, the double floors of yellow gowns on one wall. Yellow is kind of an unappreciated color. Why is yellow such a misunderstood color?

Andrew Bolton: I think it-- 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 yellow. At one point, if it's a very sunflower yellow, it denotes happiness, but on the other side, when it's a murky yellow, it's about melancholia. In a way, it captures the full spectrum of one's emotions, and, again, was a very difficult color to achieve. We worked 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.

Alison Stewart: On the other side is a jacket sewn by Loeve, and it's covered in grass seed. 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?

Andrew Bolton: Well, in a way, that coat is, I don't know, the sort of emblem for the whole exhibition. This idea of fashion being about constantly it's ephemeral. It's constantly changing. It's constantly renewing itself. It's constantly giving new ideas and different types of rebirths. I felt that, in a way, you have the garment dyed during the duration of the exhibition. It started off fresh and green. What it actually is, it's a variety of seeds, chia seeds, oak grass, that the roots are embedded into the wool, and it grows from the actual wool. It takes about 20 weeks to grow and then, obviously, if it's not watered and looked after, it does dry and finally die.

In a way, it was this whole idea 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. It was this ultimate metaphor for fashion and I felt that coat really summed it up.

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 J. G. Ballard, where this garden is plucked down to its final flower. How do you think the theme relates to the show?

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 forwards. All of our dress codes 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. Sometimes some guests really focused on the idea of flowers and foliates in terms of patterns. Others really focused on the idea of sleeping beauties, so this idea of garments that do deteriorate. Other people resurrected garments from their wardrobe and vintage pieces.

Some even came as sort of the actual aristocrats who turned themselves into sculptures. You've got the whole range of interpretations from the short story. I felt this was one of the most successful interpretations of the dress code.

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.

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 Birds. It's an orange jacket that's been screen-printed with swallows. The actual video that surrounds the garment is very much inspired by Hitchcock's The Birds. We were able to trace the actual sound that Hitchcock used in an archive in Berlin. What you're hearing is the exact sound that Hitchcock used in the film, and that sense of fear as well.

You start off with one bird, then two birds and three birds, and the whole room is then swarmed with flying birds, and it goes dark and it ends in feathers. Part of the show is about reawakening particular senses, but it's also to engage your emotions, going from happiness and joy in the garden, perhaps, and then going to fear and anxiety, I suppose, in the bird section. The show is about the senses. It's also about deploying one's emotions and connect with the rooms and with the garments, emotionally as well as sensorially.

Alison Stewart: The name of the exhibition is Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. It's up through September 2. 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.

Andrew Bolton: Thank you so much, Alison.

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