Transcript:

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Art museums have always been places for looking – paintings, sculptures, drawings. Get too close to the art and an alarm is likely to ring. NPR’s Jennifer Vanasco recently visited an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that has many beautiful things to see, but is a feast for more than just your eyes.

LUCAS: Oh, that’s nice. That’s very nice.

JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: My 10-year-old son, Lucas, is standing with me in a long gallery lined with festive hats from the past hundred years or so. One looks like a cabbage. Another is covered in red and pink roses. Glass vials hang on the walls, each connected to a hat. You lift the stopper and sniff. What you smell is neither cabbage nor rose.

LUCAS: You might like this. It’s interesting. It’s so great.

VANASCO: I don’t think we like the same smells. I don’t know if I’ll like it.

(Sound recording of a person sniffling)

VANASCO: Oh no, gross (laughs).

This is the annual exhibition of the Costume Institute of the museum, which is famous for celebrating fashion. We look at these elaborate hats and exquisite dresses and listen to the conversations around us, because people have come expecting to see beautiful clothes. They were not expecting the smells.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Which one smells worse?

VANASCO: Someone said it’s really strange what we’re doing, smelling hats.

It’s pretty strange. But it also opens your eyes or your nose.

SISSEL TOLAAS: I’m Sissel Tolaas.

VANASCO: Tolaas is internationally known as a smell artist. She has a background in organic chemistry. She worked with the museum to bring the smell of these garments to life. She recorded the molecules they emitted, had them analyzed in the lab, and then reproduced those molecules for visitors to smell. She wondered what information was hidden in the museum’s garments.

TOLAAS: So this is an attempt to revive fashion beyond its appearance.

VANASCO: Everyone has their own smell, says Tolaas.

TOLAAS: As unique as a fingerprint – you send me molecules. I absorb them. I know who you are before I see you.

VANASCO: More and more cultural institutions are experimenting with smells. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra perfumed the air of a concert with the scent of forest, thunderstorms and vanilla. An exhibit at the Smithsonian features a cast-iron pot where you can smell the kind of food the gold miners might have eaten. Tolaas doesn’t simply recreate what might have been or force a generic scent on visitors. She connects visitors to the lives of the women who actually wore the clothes. A garment that gives off one kind of molecule might mean the woman was stressed. Others might suggest she drank coffee, smoked a cigarette or ate meat.

TOLAAS: Looking is important, but we should not forget that with every breath we take in a huge amount of information that bypasses the rational part of the brain and activates emotions and memories. This is essential for survival.

VANASCO: We’re now in a small room with three evening gowns and we’re standing in front of a wall that uses nanotechnology. You rub the wall and then you sniff it.

(Sound recording of a person sniffling)

TOLAAS: Oh.

VANASCO: There is a dark musky note, a slightly sharp smell. And then a sweetness.

TOLAAS: Then you turn around. Then you go to the dress. Ah, now I understand. Yes.

VANASCO: What I smell is the scent of a woman’s skin, coming from a dress she wore at the turn of the century. It’s a completely different way of experiencing an object in a museum. The smell makes the women who wore those dresses feel present. You feel like you know them. That’s because the smell evokes emotions, imagination and memories.

ANDREW BOLTON: It’s very experiential. It’s very intimate, and the idea is that you connect with these objects in a very intimate, very personal, but also very participatory way.

VANASCO: Andrew Bolton is the curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He says smells and other sensory cues highlighted here, like touch and sound, are essential aspects of fashion. But most museum visitors don’t have access to them when an object is displayed in the traditional way.

BOLTON: You can’t touch it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it. You can’t wear it.

VANASCO: But this exhibit gives that information back to these garments, garments that were once worn by real people who moved and made sounds and smelled. Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.

(Sound recording from the song “Forbidden Fruit” by J. Cole)