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Title: In pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection
Time: 27 November 2019–MAY 17, 2020 Place: The Met Fifth Avenue 
Evening Dress, Cristóbal Balenciaga for House of Balenciaga , summer 1961; gift of Sandy Schreier. Photo: Nicholas Alan Cope, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Costume Institute's fall exhibition features 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 will explore 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.
Sandy Schreier the collector, 1998
The gift is part of The Met's 2020 Collections Initiative celebrating the Museum's 150th anniversary. In Pursuit of Fashion will feature approximately 80 of the 165 promised gifts, including womenswear, accessories, and fashion illustrations dating from a 1908 pochoir album, Les Robes de Paul Poiret, developed in collaboration with Paul Iribe to a 2004 Phillip Treacy butterfly hat.
Dress, Madeleine & Madeleine (French, 1919–26), ca. 1923; Promised gift of Sandy Schreier. Photo: Nicholas Alan Cope, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Schreier was introduced to fashion through her father Edward Miller, a furrier at the Detroit outpost of Russeks Department Store, owned by the parents of the photographer Diane Arbus. She admired the clothes of the well-heeled clients so much that they would eventually bring in their cast-offs for her to play with.
Mesmerised by the golden age Hollywood films and the beauty of the film costumes, Schreier slowly started collecting them, and as she herself put it: “my main criterion is whether the piece meets the standard of fashion as art.” Further reading:
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