THE MET ACQUISITION | MAKING OF THE SUNRAY DRESS

Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

We are still on a high from our exciting news that our Sunray Dress from the Memory Shapes collection has been acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a part of The Costume Institute’s Collection. It is on view in the spring 2024 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.

Discover some of the intricate details that went into its conception and making below.

In the UK, in the summer of 2022, The Met Office issued a red ‘extreme heat’ and ‘danger to life’ warning for the first ever time in its history. 

Phoebe experienced this time while navigating life with a new-born baby. The stark contrast between the joy of new life during the extremity of the unprecedented environmental situation that summer, is included in the sketchbook drawing, ‘Red Hot Sun.’ 

The term ‘Sunray’ and use of the bright saturated yellow, created with the heritage dye plant Weld, is a reflection on this experience. The colour speaks to both a heralding of joy she experienced during this time and a warning reminder of the dangers of this new type of heat.

The studio has built a variety of partnerships with producers of different textile waste streams over the years. The fabric the Sunray dress is made from is a silk which we receive as off cuts from a network we have built of bridal companies across the UK. This very fine silk usually comes in large triangular off cuts (wedding dresses tend to be circular when cut out.) We developed the wide tubular panelling technique with this fabric and implemented it in seemingly random stacks of multiples, so the dress had a frenetic quality. Ordered when static and chaotic during motion.

The tubular silk panels were dyed with British grown Weld, hand and organically grown in Suffolk. A heritage dye plant used by humans for centuries, Reseda Luteola, or more commonly known as Weld, is a common weed but when used in the right natural dye conditions can produce radiant hues of yellow onto textiles. Weld plants are found growing in urban areas, alongside roads, railways and embankments. Working with regional growers of dye plants is a future looking focus of the studio as we aim to work in better alignment with our natural systems.

Directly dying the sewn silk strips allowed the Weld dye maximum surface area to affect the fabrics colour. When combined with the silk protein fibre base it resulted in a very, very bright clear, almost electric yellow – a fitting reflection of the narrative of the collection.

Now this piece that is so special to us will forever be kept in The Costume Institute's collection at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is currently on display in their, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, exhibition until 2nd September 2024 and is featured in the exhibition catalogue.