In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection

”The Costume Institute’s fall 2019 exhibition featured promised gifts from Sandy Schreier, a pioneering collector, who over the course of more than half a century assembled one of the finest private fashion collections in the United States. The show explored how Schreier amassed a trove of twentieth-century French and American couture and ready-to-wear, not as a wardrobe, but in appreciation of this form of creative expression.” [source]

Sandy Schreier, a fashion historian and private collector from Detroit owns more than 15.000 couture items and accessories from France, American ready-to-wear, and early twentieth-century Italian designs. She also owns Hollywood costumes such as Rita Hayworth’s dress from ‘Gilda’, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s dress from ‘Moulin Rouge’, or the metal-mesh mini dress by Roberto Rojas that Twiggy wore in Richard Avedon’s photograph (second image, below). The Met exhibition featured just 80 of these collection items, and they took up the entire Costume Institute’s show space… makes you think of the size of storage room needed to house the entire collection, doesn’t it!

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

January 2nd, 2020

Vera Paints a Scarf

”Vera Paints a Scarf was a selection of the work of artist Vera Neumann (1907-1993) and her contributions to the field of American design. Neumann was among the most successful female design entrepreneurs of the 20th century, and an originator of the American lifestyle brand. Over the course of her career, which spanned from her label’s debut in 1942 to her death in 1993, Neumann produced an iconic line of women’s scarves all signed with a cursive “Vera” and stamped with a ladybug, as well as thousands of textile patterns based on her drawings, paintings, and collages. This exhibition was the first to comprehensively examine her career—and highlights the keys to her success: her joyful and inventive aesthetic, democratic design ethos, fusion of craft and mass production, and clever marketing.”

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)

December 26th, 2019

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion was a retrospective of the work of the pioneering couturier, known for his futuristic creations and extensive licensing, which ultimately had a negative impact on the brand’s image (I remember growing up, the Cardin signature was omnipresent, from exclusive, out of my reach fashions, to cheap lighters and pens sold at the corner newspaper shop). The exhibition presented over 170 objects drawn from Cardin’s atelier and archive, which may sound like a lot, but was a mere fraction of the designer’s work over the decades.

Brooklyn Museum

August 25th, 2019

Rainbows

“Camp is ‘those men and women…leaking laughter and tears while reliving their favorite nuances from…Off-key strains of Somewhere over the Rainbow.'” —J. Bryan Lowder, 2013

Burberry, Christopher Bailey Cape, A/W 2018-19
Salvatore Ferragamo Sandal, 1938, designed for Judy Garland & Gucci, Alessandro Michele Shoe, resort 2017
Bridget Riley, Elysium, 1973/2003 – Acrylic on canvas

Camp: Notes on Fashion @The Metropolitan Museum of Art, paired with Bridget Riley’s painting from the Met collection.

June 1st, 2019

A Second Childhood

“Since camp involves the refusal to grow up, it sees aging as a particularly unattractive process which it is important to carry out with good humor.” —Mark Booth, 1983

Walter Van Beirendonck ensemble A/W 2001-2 & Comme des Garçons coat, S/S 2018

Camp: Notes on Fashion @The Metropolitan Museum of Art

June 1st, 2019

The REDЯUM Dress

“Camp is the psychopathology of affluence.”

“Camp is things-being-what-they-are-not.” —Susan Sontag 1964

Undercover “Ensembles,” S/S 2018

“The horror genre, in particular, is susceptible to a camp interpretation. Not all horror films are camp, of course; only those which make the most stylish conventions for expressing instant feeling, thrills, sharply defined personality, outrageous and ‘unacceptable’ sentiments, and so on.” —Jack Babuscio, 1977

Camp: Notes on Fashion @The Metropolitan Museum of Art

June 1st, 2019