“It’s a gull’s head that’s been coated in silicone,” explains Andrew Bolton, the 49-year-old British-born curator in charge of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is examining a dress by Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, a wild whip of silicone fringing frozen in motion, the gull skulls caught as if attempting to fly. The dress will appear in the Costume Institute’s new show Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, opening next week.
We are standing in the conservation lab of what, since 2014, has been named the Anna Wintour Costume Center. All around are garments. The work benches are covered in tissue paper and furnished with the crates in which various archive clothes have been delivered. “This piece was grown,” says Bolton of another dress by Van Herpen, the jagged contours of which have been “drawn out” by magnets. “It’s a sort of resin that has iron filings in it,” he explains.
The room has more the air of a geeky science club than a hushed couture atelier. In the corner is a Hussein Chalayan dress from which paper pollens fly on wires. On the table is an Issey Miyake A-POC, an experiment in cutting clothes from a roll of fabric that was planned to be shown on 20 conjoined mannequins. “It’s like The Human Centipede,” says Bolton, referring to the 2009 horror film.