The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s 2024 spring exhibition, which serves as the inspiration for the theme of the accompanying Met Gala, will be on display at the museum from May 10 through September 2. And while the themes of the past three year’s showcases have been more straightforward — mining the archives of Karl Lagerfeld’s career, glamour from the Gilded Age, and American fashion broadly — this year’s will be based on more conceptual reference points around fashion history, nature, technology and the senses.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will pull 250 rare “masterworks” from the Institute’s archive for museum-goers to experience in a new, imaginative way, according to a news release.
“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,” said the Institute’s curator Andrew Bolton in a statement. “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’s pieces will all be united through their connections to the natural world, exploring “rebirth and renewal,” according to the release.
Garments too fragile to be dressed on mannequins will be displayed instead as the titular “sleeping beauties,” appearing in coffin-like glass displays with microscopes available to observe their deterioration up close, according to the Institute.
Contemporary technology enhances and enlivens the antiquity: There’s a 3-D-printed maquette of a “Mini Miss Dior” dress, and an audio recording of razor clam shells that were embroidered on a Spring 2001 Alexander McQueen Dress. There’s even a custom ChatGPT portal, where visitors can ask questions to a ghost-in-the-machine of a woman named Natalie Potter, who was a socialite in 1930s New York. Her 1931 wedding dress by Callot Soeurs closes the show.
Sumber: www.cnn.com
