Blown Up: Collaborative Conservation and Sustainable Treatment for a Dress with Inflatable Sleeves

This paper discusses the treatment of a dress with inflatable sleeves by Issey Miyake. At the time of this project, the dress was not yet an accessioned museum object, but was on loan from the personal collection of Cincinnati collector Mary Baskett, who required it to continue to function as a wearable garment as well as art. This necessitated devising a treatment protocol that preserved the function of the dress as well as addressed its major condition problem: the inflatable sleeves no longer held air due to the failure of the adhesive holding the inflation valves in place. A treatment plan was developed after discussion with the owner and professionals inside and outside the museum and from a variety of fields, and testing. Ultimately, the treatment involved filling the sleeves with polystyrene beads inside a Stabiltex liner to recreate a “blown-up” appearance without the need for actual inflation.