New York
Exhibitions based on the collection of a fashionista don’t always thrill. Recalling the 2006 Met show “Nan Kempner : American Chic,” I still see a floating rack bunched with way too many lunching-lady blazers. And the 2015 show on Jacqueline de Ribes, a countess who was a couturier for a time and deeply cultured, nevertheless smacked of society first, design second, which is why her own work went only so far. When you’re too inside, you can’t see how narrow your vision has become. “Rara Avis,” a 2005 exhibition fashioned from the wardrobe of woman-about-world Iris Apfel, was inspiring because Ms. Apfel has kept herself outside, honing a textile-driven bohemian style that is wide-eyed (look at her signature eyeglasses—two big round O’s), enlarged by historical and cultural references. The Met exhibition “In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection” introduces us to another outsider.
In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection
The Met Fifth Avenue
Through May 17
Truth be told, the name Sandy Schreier—and the Ali Baba’s treasure connected with it—has been reverently mentioned in fashion circles for decades, not least by museum curators. But Ms. Schreier lives way outside those circles, in a suburb of the city in which she was born, Detroit. Her parents moved there in the 1930s so that her father, who worked for the Manhattan specialty store Russeks, could manage the fur salon of the fledgling Detroit branch. All that auto-industry money! All those couture-wearing wives! When a new sister demanded her mother’s attention, Sandy accompanied her father to work—she was only 3 or 4 years old—and pored over Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar while experiencing hands-on the enchantment of French and American high design. No igniting moment, no epiphany. The little girl instinctively knew that fashion could be art and she would collect it. (New York’s Museum of Modern Art still hasn’t figured this out.)
Ms. Schreier was not curating her own wardrobe—as another prescient girl, Marjorie Merriweather Post, decided to do back in the early 1900s—but preserving “beauty.” The power of her passion led Detroit wives to give her their once-worn, still-perfect pieces. As she told the New York Times in July, “One Halloween my mother insisted I wear one of the dresses as my costume and I had a huge temper tantrum and refused. Even then, I didn’t want anyone wearing them. I always said, ‘If I owned a Picasso, it would not be on my back.’”
Piece by piece, her pristine “Picassos”—eventually numbering in the thousands—added up to one of the finest private collections in the country. Planning for the future, Ms. Schreier recently invited the Met’s Costume Institute to choose “promised gifts” for its collection. The current exhibition displays 80 of the 165 pieces the Institute picked—all from the 20th and 21st centuries, many filling gaps in its archive—and they are choice.
The garment that greets viewers as they enter the downstairs gallery sets the tone. It’s a magnificent evening sheath circa 1923, a lace of pink silk gauze with Egyptian motifs in gold-metal thread; across the hips is the stylized image of a flying ibis rendered in pink and aqua stones. The dress was owned by Matilda Dodge Wilson, widow of the founder of Dodge Motor Co., and it speaks to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, an archaeological find that had everyone buzzing. The ibis symbolizes fertility, so its spread-winged placement upon the pelvis is dramatically pointed, but it also symbolizes communication. One of Ms. Schreier’s important early acquisitions, the dress is emblematic of her collecting criteria: expression on many levels at once—historical, poetic, social—with imaginative flight sewn in. Created by Madeleine & Madeleine, a short-lived Parisian house that most of us have never heard of, it’s a first for the Met collection.
Organized by Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Costume Institute, associate curator Jessica Regan and assistant curator Mellissa Huber, this focused show, elegantly paced, is divided into four main areas of interest—Ms. Schreier’s interests. The first section, “In Pursuit of Beauty: Origins of a Collection”—exquisite and allusive postwar pieces—holds the fewest surprises, though the late-Dior “Du Barry” dress (autumn/winter 1957-58) is scrumptious, and the juxtaposition of Charles James’s floating black “Swan” dress (1952-54) and Jacques Griffe’s pyramidal black taffeta (c. 1955) is fascinating for what they say about below-the-waist storytelling.
“The Past Recaptured,” in a word sublime, offers an array of Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo’s jackets, tunics and pleated “Delphos” dresses alongside the work of the Italian designer, another name new to me, Maria Monaci Gallenga, who took inspiration from Fortuny and appears every bit his match. Upon velvet, both designers printed antiquity’s brocade patterns in gold and silver, using secret processes that left the fabric supple and comfortable to wear. Gallenga’s two evening capes, circa 1925, are mesmerizingly operatic—held notes scaled to history. “L’Esprit Nouveau: The Interwar Era” captures the swift cycling of silhouettes from the 1920s to the ’30s—from the Lanvin and Boué Soeurs “robe de style” silhouette of flat chest and wide hips, to electrically beaded flapper shifts, to body-skimming gowns by Chanel and Vionnet.
Perhaps the fourth section, “The Message Is the Medium: Fashion That Speaks,” best captures Ms. Schreier’s desire for articulate invention. Rudi Gernreich’s trompe l’oeil, Christian Francis Roth’s sunny-side-up surrealism, Patrick Kelly’s silvery sleight of hand, Moschino’s metaphor (a glove is a hand) and Philip Treacy’s metamorphosis (a brainstorm of multicolored Monarch butterflies)—the room is alive with wit. The little Bes-Ben “doll” hat, circa 1946, with six small red-leather lobsters grouped on top, nods literally to the lobsters of Elsa Schiaparelli and Charles James—designers who consciously fused fashion and art. I’m guessing Ms. Schreier had to have it.
—Ms. Jacobs is the Arts Intel Report editor for the weekly newsletter Air Mail.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-pursuit-of-fashion-the-sandy-schreier-collection-review-for-staring-not-wearing-11578744000
2020-01-11 12:00:00Z
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