Dr. Elizabeth Lundén

The museum was quite well organized with a board constituted of very important women in the fashion scene in New York City.

So some of them, led by Eleanor Lambert, who was a very famous publicist in the fashion scene and in the art world, together with Dorothy Shaver, who was the president of one of the biggest department stores in New York City.

They decide to save these costumes and to do something with them.

They didn't want to let this museum die.

And they go to the president of Saks Fifth Avenue.

And he lets them store these things in an abandoned building in New York City, in Manhattan.

She goes to Francis Taylor, who was the president of The Met at the time, and she tries to persuade him of taking this collection

under the wing of the Met.

And she has a couple of arguments to convince him about why it is important to store all these costumes in the Met.

Many people don't think about this, but New York City was a manufacturing hub with a lot of industrial textile work in its early days.

So one of the arguments is, look, this is also New York history, so let's have this in the museum.

The other one was, well, let's preserve them for inspiration for other designers in the future and also for students who want to come and see how these garments were constructed.

And then she throws the coin off.

The fashion industry would be extremely interested in having these things preserved.

So those were the three key arguments that she used to convince Taylor.

He said, I want a token of $125,000 as a gesture demonstrating that they want to preserve these costumes and $30,000 per year to run the operations for this wing of the Met.

They go out and they start asking members of the fashion industry if they could contribute money for this enterprise.

And it goes very well.

Remember, they had connections, and they get in $350,000.

So way beyond.