SLEEPING BEAUTIES: REAWAKENING FASHION – NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

Date: 2024
Status: Complete
Category: Exhibition
Size: 12,000 s.f.
Team: Dominic Leong, Chris Leong, Dina Reziapova, Remi McClain, Chloe Munkenbeck, Ines Yupanqui
Collaborators: Andrew Bolton (Head Curator), Nick Knight (Creative Consultant), SHOWStudio (animations), Sissel Tolaas (Smell Researcher and Artist), Proof Productions (Fabrication), Kohler Ronan (Mechanical and Electrical), CS Global (Lighting), Hush (A/V Design) Naho Kubota (Photography)
Press: Vogue

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute faces an inherent complexity in exhibiting archival fashion: making historic garments accessible to a broad audience while preserving them for posterity. For their spring 2024 exhibition, Leong Leong responded to that paradox by reactivating the sensory capacities of approximately 220 garments and accessories, united by the theme of nature. 

During the exhibition design process, Leong Leong considered two ways in which we spatially understand or relate to nature: through a laboratory—analyzed via heightened vision, reason, and empiricism—and on the other hand through a garden—experiencing nature by way of our bodies, senses, intuitions, and memories. Drawing on a laboratory’s theater of observation, the design utilizes the aesthetics of bell jars and beakers to showcase the garments as specimens, encouraging visitors to experience objects through the lens of scientific inquiry. Based on traditional English gardens, the exhibition plan features a central garden-like space that creates an opening in the otherwise episodic, immersive experience.

Each room produces a unique immersive environment intended to bring the objects to life by engaging a visitor’s sense of touch, smell, sound, vision and proprioception. The walls of one space are embossed with the otherwise untouchable foliate, vegetal, and insectoid embroidery of an Elizabethan bodice; the bodily odors of Millicent Rogers are made present through a series of sniffable tubes designed by Sissel Tolaas while wall surfaces in another area are activated by scratch and sniff paint infused with rose-scented perfumes which linger in the fabrics of several gowns. A passageway is enlivened by the faint rustling of silks – a sound called “scroop” historically significant in gown making. 

Punctuating the exhibition is a series of “sleeping beauties”—garments in a state of “inherent vice” that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their extreme fragility—displayed in brushed mirror niches, amplifying the ability to view their states of deterioration. Select “sleeping beauties” were brought back to life by the illusion technique known as Pepper’s ghost.