Shane Valentino designed the exhibition environments for three Costume Institute shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art — In Pursuit of Fashion: The Sandy Schreier Collection, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, and In America: An Anthology of Fashion. Working alongside curator Andrew Bolton, Shane designed each exhibition to respond to the unique architecture and geography of its location within the museum — guiding audiences through the collections with a filmmaker’s understanding of space, movement, and narrative.
Client
Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Services
Installation
Challenge
Each exhibition occupied a different area of the museum, from the Anna Wintour Costume Center to the American Wing period rooms, requiring environments that worked with the architecture.
Shane designed the exhibition environments in close collaboration with Andrew Bolton, treating each space like a set — considering sightlines, audience flow, lighting, and how visitors would move through and experience the collections. For In Pursuit of Fashion, the design drew on 1930s film set architecture. For the In America exhibitions, cinematographer Bradford Young joined Shane on sets and lighting, bringing a cinematic quality to how the garments were presented.
Result
Three exhibitions that transformed how fashion was experienced inside one of the world’s most visited museums. Each one shaped by the space it inhabited.
