Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion is the 2024 high fashion art exhibition of the Anna Wintour Costume Center, a wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA) which houses the collection of the Costume Institute. It featured approximately 250 items from the permanent collection of the Costume Institute that were displayed using AI and CGI with themes of sea, land, and sky as a metaphor for the fragility and ephemerality of fashion and a vehicle to examine the cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal.

Met Gala

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inaugurates its annual exhibition with a formal benefit dinner at The Costume Institute Benefit, also informally known as the Met Gala. The annual gala for the 2024 exhibition took place on May 6, 2024. The co-chairs for the event were Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Anna Wintour, and Zendaya. The dress code for the evening was "The Garden of Time" inspired by the short story of the same name by J. G. Ballard. Shou Zi Chew, chief executive officer of TikTok, and Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Loewe, served as honorary chairs of the event.

Co-chairs Zendaya and Bad Bunny, Tyla, Elle Fanning, Taylor Russell, Ariana Grande, Rebecca Ferguson, Kendall Jenner, Nicki Minaj and Greta Lee were hailed as the best-dressed at the gala across multiple publications such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post.

Exhibition design

The exhibition was curated by Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute since 2015. Photographer Nick Knight acted as the Creative Consultant for the exhibition, with Knight's own fashion communications company SHOWstudio developing the various technological activations included in the exhibition. The exhibition design was constructed by architecture studio and design consultancy Leong Leong in collaboration with The Met’s Design Department. Researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas developed smells to accompany select objects in the show, to incorporate the exhibition's theming around decay.

Bolton commented on the exhibition's intentions: “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. The exhibition endeavors to animate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions. 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.”

Designers included in the exhibition:

• Cristóbal Balenciaga
• Hattie Carnegie
• Lilly Daché
• Hubert de Givenchy
• Deirdre Hawken
• Stephen Jones
• Guy Laroche
• Madame Pauline
• Mainbocher
• Elsa Schiaparelli
• Sally Victor
• Jonathan Anderson

External links

• Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion