“…to sleep, perchance to dream…”
In its focus on sensory immersion and participatory elements, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”—the Costume Institute’s new show, opening to the public on May 10, after the 2024 Met Gala tonight—moves toward breaking the fourth wall. This is achieved physically by the limited use of glass cases, and in other more intangible ways. It could be argued that Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge, and his team are attempting to create a kind of synesthesia (a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second one) through smell, sound, and sight.
In person, and in the catalog, Bolton relates an anecdote about a young visitor to last year’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition asking the guard why she couldn’t touch anything, which is an almost instinctual action around clothing. Touch is of primary importance to wearers and designers alike, yet it is a sense denied in museums for the protection of the objects which they hold in trust for perpetuity. (Exposure to certain light levels and skin oils are two factors that contribute to the decomposition of fabric.) Physical touch remains elusive in “Sleeping Beauties,” but the idea of it, Bolton notes, is very much alive. The exhibition, he says “makes you realize that actually your sense of sight is a way of touching…touching your feelings, touching your emotion, touching your memory. It’s always been a little bit frustrating when a garment comes into the museum and the only sense you are really left with is sight…you can focus on the construction, the technique, the embroidery. But I think by activating these other senses, you also realize that sight is much more complex than just looking at something.”
To enter the exhibition is to cross a border into another realm—maybe the Land of Nod. The first thing the visitor’s eye falls on is Constantin Brancusi’s ovid bronze, The Sleeping Muse of 1910, a solid take on an altered state of being where dreams exist. This sculpture is worth taking some time over, as it suggests multiple readings. To start, it might be understood as an opening salvo meant to have resonance on an institutional level. More than 100 years after Brancusi made this piece, costume departments are still justifying their existence in museum contexts and in the hierarchy of the arts. It might also speak to the cerebral nature of Bolton’s approach to fashion.