In a dimly lit gallery in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, smell artist and scientist Sissel Tolaas invites me to sniff the wall. I press my nose against the hard surface and my nostrils fill with the most intimate stench: something citrusy, ripe and pungently human. This musk was made from molecules discovered on a silk and velvet 1913 Paul Poiret gown, then applied to the walls using nanotechnology. It is a strange experience. The dress’s owner, Denise Poiret, died in 1982, the year I was born — we have never met, and yet here I am, smelling her armpits.
Such unusual occurrences are at the heart of the Met’s new exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, which attempts to bring to life archival gowns — some of which lie flat in cases, too fragile to hang — by activating the senses. Visitors can run their hands along embroidery-embossed walls; they can listen to the rustle of a replica 1770s gown, recalling a time when “scroop” (the sound made by a silk dress in movement) was central to the art of seduction. Still, it is the smell aspect of the show that is the most intriguingly unsettling.
Tolaas, a striking figure with fringed, bobbed blonde hair who wears a soft black silk suit, gold Dries Van Noten platforms and a sweep of under-eye kohl liner, spent a year collecting smell molecules from garments in the Met’s archive in preparation for the show. Her intention, she explains, is never to create a “nice” scent. As she explains in a gallery dedicated to red roses, “It would be easy to say, ‘Ah! Here we’ll make the smell of a rose.’ But I’m not interested in that.” Instead, she collected smell molecules from the armpits and waists of a decaying rose-embroidered silk tulle 1923 Lanvin dress, and from a 1958 crimson Dior dress, then pumped the molecules the two dresses had in common through a set of clear Perspex tubes.
The molecules she discovered, she says, tell stories about the wearers’ lives. Even if those stories are not definitive (for example, does the presence of carvone, a molecule found in dental products, on the Lanvin dress suggest that the wearer had a dental procedure herself, or that she chewed gum, or that she was in the presence of someone else chewing gum?), they make the gown feel a lot “less abstract”.
This is true, too, in a gallery devoted to early-20th-century heiress Millicent Rogers. Several items from her wardrobe have been analysed, including Schiaparelli’s famous seed-packet dress from 1937, which contained smell molecules associated with essential oils and with fruits and plants such as basil. Around it are several of Rogers’ hats and aprons, into which are attached clear tubes, their design conceived to echo the veins and internal systems of the body. The many molecules discovered include those associated with hair wax, dogs, meat, fish and fungi; a selection will be pumped through the tubes for visitors to sniff.
Tolaas speaks in long, poetic, interconnecting sentences about smell; that makes her tricky to interview in the traditional sense, but fascinating to sit back and listen to. She grew up in Iceland and Norway, as the eldest of six sisters; she spent “a lot of time outdoors and was nerdy, curious about science”. She studied organic chemistry, mathematics, art and linguistics at universities in Oslo, Warsaw, St Petersburg and Oxford, and completed her PhD in chemistry in Moscow. Eventually, she realised that smell was her passion, though at the time, she says, in “the intellectual discourse, smell was seen as a private, intrinsic emotional thing — so why pay attention?”
She was not necessarily born with a finely tuned nose, she says, but “if you train your body you get good muscles — same with the senses. And if you don’t take care of them and keep them fit, they will go extinct very quickly.” She is alarmed by how alienated we have become from the sense of smell in the capitalist west. The concept of body odour, she points out, “was invented by America, in order that marketing could tell us to cover it up”. Now, as babies, “we smell deodorant before we smell breast milk.”
For Tolaas, however, smell is life: she now runs what she describes as the “largest private archive of smells in the world” in Berlin. She has staged countless art and science projects, including conserving smell molecules in Pompeii and creating smells for Balenciaga (in 2019 she pumped molecules found in blood, antiseptic, petrol and money through the air-conditioning vents for a show themed around power dressing).
She has recently become a cult figure in fashion herself: for spring/summer 2024 she was asked to walk the catwalk for the Kering-owned brand, along with fashion critic Cathy Horyn and fashion blogger Diane Pernet. Before stepping out, she says she “showered” in two or three smell molecules from the Balenciaga archive, something she describes as “invisible activism”.
One of the things that Tolaas — who ardently believes openness around smell can help foster tolerance — is trying to get across is “Don’t be afraid of strangers.” She also believes smells can boost self-confidence in a world sorely lacking in it. In the Sleeping Beauties show, for example, “Maybe you can’t read the text, but you can smell the content of the object. Maybe you don’t understand fashion, but you can understand the smell of it.”
Her work with the Met could have a long-term impact, as will the other sensory techniques used in the show. As curator Andrew Bolton explains: “Going forward: if there’s an object that we feel that sound is so critical to its understanding, we’ll record it in the anechoic chamber. We’re hoping to build up a database of sound and sense, still working with the amazing Sissel.” The idea, he says, is to “add to the understanding of fashion beyond the aesthetic, beyond the cultural, beyond the political, beyond the artistic, to the sensorial and the emotional.”
This, for Tolaas, is precisely how things should be. Smell, she says, offers a counterbalance to our digital lives. “The more we look at the world through a screen, the more unhappy we get. We are getting a one-dimensional understanding of the world.” And, as she points out, smell is still something we animals can claim for ourselves: “the sense of smell has not been digitalised yet — it is too complex. It’s as if it resists being manipulated!”
‘Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion’, May 10 to September 2
