Eclectic Wonders: Inside the Costume Institute’s New Exhibition, “In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection”
The Costume Institute’s new exhibition, “In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection,” highlights a remarkable treasury of fashion history assembled by the irrepressible collector over the past six decades or so. The 80 pieces on exhibition represent part of a promised gift to the museum of 165 garments or accessories from Schreier’s legendary collection, which numbers several thousand pieces.
In the exhibition’s handsome accompanying catalog, the museum’s director Max Hollein describes Schreier as “a true pioneer in the field.... Her intention,” he notes, “was always to put together a trove of high fashion, not as a wardrobe but as an appreciation of a form of creative expression.”
Curated by Head Curator Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, Associate Curator Jessica Regan, and Assistant Curator Mellissa Huber, the exhibition has been designed by movie imagists Shane Valentino and Nathan Crowley to subtly evoke the glamour of Detroit’s Art Deco architecture and the silver screen movies that first ignited the collector’s passion for fashion, and continue to intoxicate her. Meanwhile, Stephen Jones’s whimsical headpieces—turbans in thought bubbles for the Fortuny pieces, floral decorations for the 1930s couture dresses that resemble Chanel’s famed pâte de verre costume jewelry—add pizzazz. “The individual objects are so strong,” Regan notes, that these elements have been pared down to serve as a foil to the inherent drama of the clothes.
As an impressionable child 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. According to Schreier, however, she never saw these as pieces with which to play dress-up. “You wouldn’t put your Picasso on your back, would you?” is her riposte to those who question why, to this day, she was never tempted to wear the pieces herself.
The opening section of the exhibition was inspired by Schreier’s personal quest. As Regan says, “when she was first starting out as a collector she didn’t know very much about fashion history and she was just responding to the formal qualities of what she saw. She was looking for beauty and that’s what inspired her.”
“Glamour and fun” are the watchwords for Schreier’s collecting and Regan explains that Schreier is drawn to a sense of drama. “I think that that element is something that was shaped very early on by watching films of the golden age of Hollywood—she was just really captivated by the glamour of film costume and that’s something that stayed with her and that she has sought out in her own collecting.” Schreier herself says, “my main criterion is whether the piece meets the standard of fashion as art.”
As a fellow collector myself it has always been fascinating to me seeing the sort of pieces that the larger-than-life Schreier was drawn to at auctions we have shopped together—generally very emphatic, entrance-making clothes. She will seek out a piece that she can characterize as “a singer and a dancer.” Like any great collector’s collection, it ultimately reveals Schreier herself. “I am the collection,” Schreier has said, “and the collection, in turn, is me. We are joined at the hip.”
I knew of her collection by reputation, but when I was finally invited to visit Schreier at home in a suburb of Detroit—to which, along with her earlier family house, such designers as Zandra Rhodes, Yves Saint Laurent, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Isaac Mizrahi, Thea Porter, and Stephen Jones have all beaten a path—I was amazed by the eclectic wonders that she had been quietly assembling through the decades and graciously pulled from her storage to show me.
I was also, it must be admitted, deeply envious of the unexpected possibilities that Detroit itself had presented for Schreier through the decades. As a young woman with a passion for historic fashion in the 1960s, Schreier was ideally placed to source clothing from the wardrobes and estates of the wives of the automotive titans who were often legendary clients of the Paris haute couture and the highest end of American custom designers. Women like the extravagant, wasp-waisted Elizabeth Parke Firestone who shopped extensively with such designers as Christian Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga and who ordered her tiny custom evening shoes—made to match the dress—several dainty pairs at a time because her husband was a clumsy dancer. (Her lady’s maid was positioned behind the ballroom door, poised in readiness with a replacement pair, should his shoe have crushed and soiled his wife’s.) Schreier was called in to help appraise the clothes in Firestone’s estate—thousands of couture garments and accessories—and ultimately acquired some treasures for herself, which are now showcased at the museum. As Regan notes, Schreier “did make a lot of really incredible finds because she was looking in a place at a time when there wasn’t a great deal of competition from collectors and so she preserved a certain number of pieces that likely would not have been preserved had she not found them.” Schreier describes herself as a “fashion savior.”
