“The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. On view from May 10 through September 2, 2024, the exhibition features 220 garments and accessories that are connected visually through nature, which also serves as a metaphor for the transience of fashion. The show will bring to life the sensory capacities of these masterworks through a wide range of encounters: visitors are invited to smell the aromatic histories of hats bearing floral motifs; to touch the walls of galleries that are embossed with the embroidery of select garments; and to experience—via the illusion technique known as Pepper’s ghost—how the ‘hobble skirt’ restricted women’s stride in the early 20th century. Punctuating the galleries are a series of ‘sleeping beauties’—garments that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their extreme fragility.” — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Max Hollein, the Museum’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer, said: “The Met’s innovative spring 2024 Costume Institute exhibition pushes the boundaries of our imagination and invite us to experience the multisensory facets of a garment—those facets that deteriorate and become lost after entering a museum collection as an object. Sleeping Beauties heightens our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking what it was like to feel, move, hear, smell, and interact with them when they could be worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty, and artistic brilliance of the works on display.” 

Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, commented: “When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. The exhibition endeavors to animate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions. By appealing to the widest possible range of human senses, the show aims to reconnect with the works on display as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, with dynamism, and ultimately with life.”

The exhibition is organized by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. Nick Knight is the Creative Consultant for the exhibition, with SHOWstudio developing and realizing the various technological activations. Exhibition design is by Leong Leong in collaboration with The Met’s Design Department. ST smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas will develop smells to accompany select objects in the show.

Title image: Dress, Jun Takahashi (Japanese, born 1969) for Undercover (Japanese, founded 1990), spring/summer 2024; Courtesy Undercover. Photography © Nick Knight, 2024. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. :

Images courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.