“In the exhibition, the very first thing you see in terms of that sort of interaction is this beautiful Pepper’s Ghost of a [Charles Frederick] Worth dress. It’s moving…you can sort of imagine it dancing across the ballroom again.
We’ve had the privilege to work with the conservators, and, of course, they know everything. So you look at the dress and you say, ‘Okay, well why does it move that way?’ Well, because it’s got six petticoats underneath it and they’re made of this material. So there’s all this information about the structure of the dress, which we can bring back to it. But on top of that, there’s a sort of societal structure to it: Why they wore it, how they stood in it? Did they expect to dance a lot, or not at all? Would people be sitting down? How would it be viewed; by candle light, by gaslight? That’s where the Met [archivists] are so brilliant because they have this wealth of knowledge.
The sound of a dress was really important in its selling, to articulate this fantastic ‘scroop.’ That’s a strange word which is used to describe this sound of taffeta moving against duchesse satin or whatever it is. If your dress had a very high scroop value, it was fantastic; if it had a pretty low scroop value, you didn’t really want it. We never think of these things, we never approach dresses in that way—what sound it would’ve made?—but the Met exhibition does.
The idea of how technology is being used to make fashion live again is the foundation of the exhibition. When you put a dress in a museum [collection], you can only touch it with gloved hands. You certainly can’t wear it anymore, let alone go dancing in it, or flirt or fall in love in it; it has to be treated very, very preciously. And so it should be, because I think fashion is very precious. However, it then does start to fade and to die and to slightly deteriorate.
Some of the dresses are so old now that if you pick them up, the weight of the silk would just tear the dress, so you’re not even allowed to lift them anymore, let alone put them on a mannequin. [In the case of the avatars] we scanned the dresses lying flat, the conservators created a pattern of them and then [SHOWstudio] recreated them [digitally]. That’s something that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, you couldn’t have done five years ago. [But now] you have this moving, dancing, gliding dress again.”