Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion at the Met Museum

The 220 artifacts for Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, the latest exhibit by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan museum of art in New York, opening to the public this Friday, were drawn from its archives with the stated aim of “reviving [their] sensory capacities.” After all, clothes are not just for looking at; they are tactile objects, and they smell. Or so the exhibit tried to remind us, in a rather clumsy way, by jumping through some snazzy scientific hoops that I doubt an average exhibit visitor will care about. In real life the olfactory experience of clothes has to do more with their wearer, that ineffable familiar smell of your lover, for example, an experience diametrically opposed to what was offered, the smell of dead, disembodied clothes. To their credit, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Institute, and his staff, are well aware of this, but their attempts at resuscitating the sartorial corpses felt forced.

Looking past the gimmicks, the collection on display and the mise-en-scene of the exhibit marked a new achievement for the Costume Institute – this was the blandest show it has put on in many years. Gone are the days of awe-inspiring exhibitions like Savage Beauty, Manus x Machina, China: Through the Looking Glass, and Heavenly Bodies. Instead we are treated to underwhelming collections of garments in underwhelming settings, reflecting the fact that the Met Museum has a serious budget deficit that it has been unable to close. Some gems from Alexander McQueen, Iris van Herpen, and Undercover notwithstanding, much of the exhibit consists of examples of early couture, like Worth and Poiret, and historical costume. If it underlined anything, it was how boring fashion was when it was dictated by the stuffy Parisian couture houses and reflected a bourgeois world order. Looking at these corpses of clothes, the relics of a bygone age, one could emphatically say, “good riddance.”

According to a cutting article in the Cut that came out a few days prior, Sleeping Beauties was realized as a backup plan, after a planned John Galliano retrospective was deemed to be “tone-deaf.” If you need a reminder, Galliano self-destructed in 2011 after he was filmed spewing anti-Semitic bile. But at least Galliano is human, brilliant and flawed, one of the greatest designers in the history of fashion, and certainly more talented than Karl Lagerfeld, the subject of last year’s Costume Institute exhibit, who was also no stranger to controversy. (Perhaps one exhibit was following too closely to the other?) But one could argue that the sterility of Sleeping Beauties, with its bland invocations of nature – flowers, birds, mermaids (are there mermaids in nature?) – as the tying theme of the exhibit, not only tenuous to its title but also kind of tone-deaf. It certainly makes one wonder whether Bolton has picked up a newspaper lately. The couple of macabre moments in the exhibit – such as the playing of “In Flanders Fields,” a haunting World War l poem by John McCrae – felt limp when set against pretty dresses with flowers on them. Though the really haunting effect of the poem, which lasts only 58 seconds when read aloud, is that you will hear it ten times, should you choose to linger to properly look at the clothes on show.

But none of this matters. The only thing that has mattered at the Costume Institute for years now is the Met Gala, as the official press release accompanying the exhibit lets you know in bold letters, before it describes the exhibit in any detail, that such luminaries of high culture as Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez will “chair” (whatever that means) this edition of the spectacle of vulgarity. 

Speaking of tone-deaf, the Costume Institute, led by Bolton, a Brit, whose boss, the head of the Met Museum, is a Brit, along with Anna Wintour, a Brit and Bolton’s unofficial boss, decided that “The Garden of Time” a short story by JG Ballard, a Brit, would be a fitting tale for highlighting that American parade of cultural insecurity and philistinism known as the Met Gala. Picking a story in which a pair of sophisticated aristocrats are engaged in a futile attempt to turn back time in order to stem the tide of the angry rabble about to overrun their walled estate as an inspiration for a pop culture spectacle was an absolutely divine piece of hilarity, because it could be read in a multitude of ways. Was the Met the walled estate overrun by the celebrity philistines and their corporate entourage? Or was our new aristocracy celebrating its last days as the philistine mob outside of the walled garden of tone-deafness that is dealing with Trump and inflation is readying its pikes? Such astounding irony was likely lost on every single attendee, who undoubtedly did not read the story. But that is the point. The story does not matter, as the tanks of the celebrity-fashion industrial complex continue to crush the wilting substance of culture. And the rabble can’t get enough; just witness the amount of press coverage devoted to Met Gala. The day after the Gala, the most popular story in the New York Times was devoted not to Gaza or Ukraine, and not to the students protesting at Columbia a few miles away, but to the red carpet looks. Bread and circuses for all.

There are few doubts left on the account that the exhibitions of the Costume Institute have become appendages to the Met Gala, and not the other way around. The feté of excess reportedly raises thirty million dollars for the Institute and the museum. Behind the red carpet glamor, the corporates bring up the rear. Loewe, one of the sponsors of the exhibit, was given space to put a boutique at the show’s entrance, peddling candles and straw bags. Such a brazen act of commerce at one of the most venerable public cultural institutions in America would have raised a storm fifteen years ago. Today, nobody bats an eyelash.

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Sleeping Beauties, Reawakening Fashion; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, through September 2, 2024

All images courtesy of the museum