The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to unveil a captivating exhibition titled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” on May 6 in New York City. The event will be celebrated with the annual Met Gala, and the exhibition offers a unique glimpse into over 400 years of fashion history, featuring around 250 pieces from the institute’s permanent archive.
The exhibition explores delicate garments that were once too fragile to display, referred to as “Sleeping Beauties.” To preserve these fragile pieces, some of which are too delicate to be placed on mannequins, the garments will be showcased lying flat in glass cases. Advanced technology such as digital animation, light projection, CGI, and AI will be used to bring the garments to life, giving visitors a sense of how they looked and moved when first created. Nick Knight, a renowned director and founder of SHOWstudio, is working with the museum to enhance the displays with his artistic expertise.
The exhibition is divided into three zones—land, sea, and sky—reflecting the natural world that inspires and shapes fashion. Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, observed recurring natural themes like flowers and butterfly wings throughout the centuries-old garments. These natural elements are woven into the very fabric of the fashion on display, as the older pieces were created using natural materials that are now susceptible to decay.
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” also highlights the Costume Institute’s role in fashion conservation. This aspect of their work is often done behind the scenes, so the exhibition serves as an acknowledgment of the meticulous efforts that go into preserving fashion history for future generations.
The Met Gala dress code for the event is “The Garden of Time,” inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story of the same name. In Ballard’s tale, Count Axel reverses time by cutting magical time flowers from his garden, symbolically representing the Costume Institute’s mission of preserving fashion history. The dress code also draws inspiration from the garden scene in the film “Orlando” (1992), which features the evolution of an 18th-century dress into a 19th-century silhouette, showcasing the cyclical nature of fashion.
Designers like Hussein Chalayan, Maison Margiela, and Alexander McQueen have incorporated themes of natural decay and the passage of time into their collections. Chalayan’s graduate collection “The Tangent Flows” from 1993 featured garments buried for weeks and unearthed for the show, demonstrating the rapid life and rebirth of fashion. Margiela’s Spring/Summer 2006 show included garments attached to rolls of fabric and jewelry made of dyed ice cubes that melted and stained the clothes, highlighting the impact of time on fashion. McQueen’s collections, such as “Plato’s Atlantis” from Spring/Summer 2010, warn of climate change and emphasize the fashion industry’s responsibility to conserve itself and the planet.