Arts&Life
exhibit
52 | NOVEMBER 21 • 2019
In Pursuit of
Sandy Schreier’
s couture
collection gets a high-
profi
le exhibit at New York’
s
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
S
andy Schreier goes way beyond
thinking clothes can make the
woman. For her, they make a
personal collection — reaching almost
15,000 items and counting. The latest
acquisition, received in November,
continues more than a half-century
fascination with
fashion-design artistry.
Schreier, a lifelong Michigan resi-
dent, is about to share a selection of
her favorite upscale garments with
visitors at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art (the MET) in New York City,
where singular items from her hold-
ings intermittently have been shown to
enhance various themes.
“In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy
Schreier Collection” will be on view
Nov. 27-May 17 to showcase about
80 of 165 promised gifts to the Met in
keeping with its Collections Initiative
celebrating the museum’
s 150th anni-
versary. Famed designers represented
include Pierre Balmain, Christian
Dior, Elsa Shiaparelli and Valentina.
“The only people who ever offered
me collecting encouragement, besides
my husband, were Met staff members,
”
says Schreier, who began visiting the
museum as a teenager and is thrilled
about the display and the namesake
catalog that accompanies it. “They
gave me validation that I was doing
something really wonderful.
“It didn’
t dawn on me how wonder-
ful it was until my husband, Sherwin,
and I took our first trip to London in
the 1970s and went to the Victoria and
Albert Museum. There was an exhib-
it, ‘
Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil
Beaton,
’
that changed my life forever.
“There were hundreds of pieces
done by the great designers of the
world, and there were pieces by the
same designers I had. That’
s when it
dawned on me that these weren’
t just
pretty dresses. This was a serious col-
lection.
”
Schreier’
s venture into acquir-
ing high-power fashions began in
childhood as she watched her father,
Edward Miller, at Russeks, a local
branch of the New York store that fea-
tured designer wear. With her dad as a
manager, she got to meet well-dressed
women in the area, and they began
gifting her what they had worn for
special occasions.
“When I was old enough to drive, I
went to Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield
Hills for any kind of dignified [home-
based] sale,
” Schreier recalls. “I let it be
known to everybody that I was inter-
ested in clothes.
“What really threw me over the top
was starting to make television appear-
ances. People called me from all over
the world. Print publicity also helped
a lot.
”
In her search for high-power outfits,
Schreier early on was introduced to
designers as she did some modeling.
Isaac Mizrahi, recently in Michigan
Fashion
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART PHOTOS © NICHOLAS ALAN COPE
TOP: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art created a book about Schreier’
s
collecting and her collection.
ABOVE:
Sandy Schreier and her late
husband, Sherwin.
continued on page 54
COURTESY SANDY SCHREIER