The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced The Costume Institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. Presented at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 10 through September 2, 2024, the exhibition will feature original research, conservation analysis, and diverse technologies to revive and explore the sensory capacities of masterworks in the Museum’s collection. Using the natural world as a uniting visual metaphor for the transience of fashion, the show will explore cyclical themes of rebirth and renewal, breathing new life into these storied objects through creative and immersive activations designed to convey the smells, sounds, textures, and motions of garments that can no longer directly interact with the body.

In celebration of the exhibition opening, The Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala) will take place on Monday, May 6, 2024. The Benefit provides the department with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations, and capital improvements.

“The Met's innovative spring 2024 Costume Institute exhibition will push the boundaries of our imagination and invite us to experience the multisensory facets of a garment, many of which get lost when entering a museum collection as an object. Sleeping Beauties will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking how they feel, move, sound, smell, and interact when being worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty, and artistic brilliance of the works on display,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and ceo.

“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 reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a diverse 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,” commented Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, The Costume Institute.

Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
May 10–September 2, 2024
The Met Fifth Avenue, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899, Floor 2
New York

The Costume Institute Benefit-Met Gala
May 6, 2024

For information about The Costume Institute Benefit and the exhibition Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion visit www.metmuseum.org