(New York) On a large horizontal table unfolds a loose late 19th century ball gown, dazzling despite the wear and tear of time: for its next major fashion exhibition in spring 2024, the Met Museum in New York will bet on the immersive for wake up “his sleeping beauties”, with TikTok as godfather.
Like his Karl Lagerfeld retrospective in 2023, the spring exhibition of the Met’s fashion department (“The Costume Institute”) is always an anticipated event, whose opening coincides in early May with the Met Gala, the famous philanthropic evening where the stars flock in extravagant outfits.
For 2024, the great New York museum has the ambition to “awaken” the “sleeping beauties” of its collections (33,000 pieces), by exhibiting them and reimagining the sensations of sound, olfactory or touch that they cannot sometimes more procurable, explained Wednesday the curator of the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, during a presentation to the press.
Example with this satin silk ball gown decorated with embroidery and embellished with muslin from the house of Worth, which rests lying on a table, in a room of the museum that looks like a laboratory, inaccessible to the public.
The 1887 piece is today too fragile and damaged to be displayed on a mannequin. It will therefore be shown flat, but also reconstituted in computer-generated images and presented in the form of a hologram, a nod to the immersive exhibitions which are on the rise.
The Met Museum exhibition will also be sponsored by TikTok, the ultra-popular video application among young people from the Chinese group ByteDance, accused for months by the American authorities of spying on its 150 million users in the United States in profit from Beijing.
Andrew Bolton highlighted its “accessibility”. “We really wanted to have the biggest and broadest platform possible in terms of global distribution,” he added when asked about possible fears that this choice would be criticized in the States -United.
In all, some 250 pieces will come back to life, with nature as a common thread, from this embroidered jacket dating back to the years 1615-1620, to the 21st century, symbolized by this 2001 dress by Alexander McQueen, made entirely of shells, including the sounds when they collide have been recreated.
Generally, the title of the exhibition – for 2024, “The Sleeping Beauties: Awakening Fashion” – also announces the dress code of the Met Gala, challenging the sometimes limitless imagination of couturiers.
