This year’s Costume Institute’s exhibition is entitled “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City. But unlike the previous displays which were fantastic feasts for the eyes, it now employs the keen sense of smell of Sissel Tolaas , a Norwegian chemist and artist in Berlin, who concocted scents out from every strand of the garments displayed. Before it was accessible to the public, Sissel spent a year studying each item, guided by the lone question: “Can the information conveyed by smell molecule breathe new life into its narrative?” Furthermore, “reawaken” has become an oft-repeated word in the gallery to emphasize how scents augment the purpose of the exhibit.
“The ultimate goal is to inspire a shift from conventional ways of perceiving—primarily through vision—to a more sensory understanding of the world. The sense of smell’s intimate connection to emotions and memories, coupled with its neuroanatomical ties makes it a powerful and overlooked medium for understanding,” she wrote in the wall label. Moreover, she organized an innovative methodology that entails capturing smell molecules from various objects, which led her to constructing a database “replicating and reproducing the recorded smells.
” In the case of the cotton summer dress that Elsa Schiaparelli designed in 1937, Sissel detected estragole, a molecular component in fruits and plants while she found squalene (human skin oil) a.