Nature Inspires Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion at the Met ~ Closing Soon

If you love gardens and fashion like I do, don’t get caught napping 😉and miss this epic exhibit at  the Met Museum: Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion is open through September 2. 

I’m all about Inspiration and this very unique exhibit will inspire you in so many ways with its distinctive homage to Nature and the Arts…   

If you absolutely, positively, cannot get to Gotham and experience the exhibit, please enjoy my recap overview.  

I bring you not only the inspired wonder of this show, but my connection to one of the fashion designers. 

Plus, I had the serendipitous experience of touring the very sensual exhibit while listening and viewing the Garden Conservancy’s Zoom webinar, Sleeping Beauties at the  Met Museum with Dominic Leong and Chloe Munkenbeck!  What were the chances?! 

The Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion is a luxurious, sensual experience and one of The best curated shows I’ve ever attended. 

Even more, it was so wonderful to see fashion design students studying and engaging with the exhibit in a special way.

The entire show tells an elevated story that honors the craftspeople who not only designed the clothes ~the fashion that is truly art, but also the makers who brought the designs to life inspired by Nature. 

You see not only flowers and blossoms but marine life, insects and reptiles and lots of feathery plumes.

It’s truly the inspired imaginations of our dreams. 

I wrote about the glamorous Met Gala in May. The exhibit continues that recherché display of luxury inspired by Nature.                          

Also at the show, you can scratch walls and play with other olfactory delights that add to the esoteric arts display in such an interpretative way.

The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, reactivates the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum’s collection through first-hand research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies—from cutting-edge tools of artificial intelligence and computer-generated imagery to traditional formats of x-rays, video animation, light projection, and soundscapes.

According to the Met Museum: “When an item of clothing enters the Costume Institute collection, its status is changed forever. What was once a vital part of a person’s life is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled. 

This exhibition reanimates these objects, helping us experience them as they were originally intended—with vibrancy, dynamism, and life.

The exhibition features approximately 220 garments and accessories spanning four centuries, all visually connected through themes of nature, which also serves as a metaphor for the transience of fashion. 

As visitors, we smell the aromatic histories of hats bearing floral motifs; touch the walls of galleries that are embossed with the embroidery of select garments; and experience—via the illusion technique known as Pepper’s ghost—how the “hobble skirt” restricted women’s stride in the early 20th century. 

Punctuating the galleries are a series of “sleeping beauties”—garments that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their extreme fragility.

From the Met’s overview: Sleeping Beauties Reawakening Fashion

When an item of clothing enters The Costume Institute’s collection, its status is irrevocably changed. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience becomes a lifeless  work of art that can no longer be worn, heard, touched, or smelled. Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion endeavors to resuscitate garments from the collection by reactivating their sensory qualities and reengaging our sensorial perceptions. With its cross-sensory offerings, the exhibition aims to extend the interpretation of fashion within museums from the merely visual to the multisensory and participatory, encouraging personal connections. The galleries unfold as a series of case studies united by the theme of nature. Motifs such as flowers and foliage, birds and insects, and fish and shells are organized into three groupings: earth, air, and water, respectively. In many ways, nature serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion—its rebirth, renewal, and cyclicity as well as its transience, ephemerality,  and evanescence. The latter qualities are evident in the “sleeping beauties,” garments that are self-destructing due to inherent weaknesses and the inevitable passage of time, which ground several of the case studies. Sleep is an essential salve for a garment’s well-being and survival, but as in life, it requires a suspension of the senses that equivocates between life and death. The exhibition is a reminder that the featured fashions— despite being destined for an eternal slumber safely within the museum’s walls—do not forget their sensory histories. Indeed, these histories are embedded within the very fibers of their being, and simply require reactivation through the mind and body, heart and soul of those willing to dream and imagine.

I have to highlight one of the designers that I first  met at the New York Botanic Garden’s Press Preview for the Orchid Show: Olivia Cheng and her nature-inspired preserved botanicals and repurposed materials. 

I love her West Village boutique, Dauphinette. While I purchased a relatively modest daisy table accessory for my Mother there, Cheng and her boutique have since created the fashions for the film star,  for the movie premiere of “It Ends With Us” featuring Blake Lively in Cheng’s floral fashions. 

Photos from Dauphinette Instagram and Getty

I have invited Olivia to be a guest for my Ladies Who Lunch Conversations videocast. Fingers crossed.  

To visit the Met Museum show in person: 

Regular Public Hours: 10 am–5 pm Sunday to Thursday, 10 am–9 pm Friday and Saturday, Closed Wednesday. You must sign up for the Virtual Queue, available in the Uris Education Center (ground floor) and the Great Hall (Floor 1), and in galleries on the way to the exhibition. Members are given priority access in the queue.

And again, if you absolutely cannot make it to the show, you can view this YouTube tour of the Met Museum’s video, featuring Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion—Exhibition Tour with Andrew Bolton | Met Exhibitions

This is one Glamorous, artful exhibit. I highly recommend it. You’ll be talking about this Fashion Show for many seasons…