Wool education at The Met in New York
The Woolmark Company provided an education about wool to young visitors at a series of four events hosted by the popular and influential Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York.
Founded in 1870, The Met is the largest art museum in the Americas, the eighth most-visited art museum in the world and the third most visited US museum.
Teens learning about the benefits of wool at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Following the opening of the ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ exhibition held at The Met in May (see box below), The Woolmark Company undertook a series of interactive, educational initiatives aimed at engaging with Gen-Z audiences at four events hosted by The Met:
Teens Take the Met – 12 May
The annual Teens Take the Met event focuses on connecting and engaging with Gen-Z through education, interactive art and creativity. This year it generated a record attendance. At the event, The Woolmark Company showcased an interactive fabric station so that teens could construct their own needle-felted creation and explore wool’s properties and benefits through touch and visual assessment. Live talks demonstrated wool processing, from fibre to yarn to fabric, and highlighted the range of applications of wool in fabric structures such as faux fur, mesh, print and others.
College Night – 17 May
In March, undergraduate and graduate student fashion designers submitted preliminary designs inspired by the Karl Lagerfeld exhibition. Chosen finalists were judged and the winners announced at College Night held in May. The Woolmark Company’s participation in the evening comprised an event called ‘Sustainable Style’ at which students got an up-close perspective on the science and skill involved in working with wool.
Museum Mile Festival – 13 June
The iconic Museum Mile Festival is a free annual event where several museums along 5th Avenue in New York open their doors to the public for the evening. The Met is one of the participating museums. Similar to the Teens Take the Met event, The Woolmark Company held a hands-on needle felting station for the public to learn more about working with wool.
Teen Studio – 1 August
Targeted at 15–18-year-old students, Teen Studio is a series of art-making workshops at which students are encouraged to unleash their creativity during a fashion workshop inspired by the ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’ exhibition and create their own fashion designs. The Woolmark Company presented the Wool Appreciation Course to the students and discussed the career opportunities in textiles and the wool industry. Following the presentation, The Met’s Teaching Artist, Rebecca Sutton, who worked at all the above events with The Woolmark Company, taught the students how to needle felt with wool and bring their knowledge of wool to life.
Event press releases mentioning The Woolmark Company were distributed to thousands of media outlets and the events were promoted and reported via The Met’s social media channels, receiving two million impressions (the number of times it was seen online). The Woolmark Company also captured wool-focussed content from The Met’s costume conservator Glenn Peterson, which was published alongside The Met’s social media accounts.
Karl Lagerfeld at The Met
As reported in the June edition of Beyond the Bale, the theme and dress code for this year’s Met Gala was based on The Met’s Costume Institute spring 2023 exhibition ‘Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty’, a posthumous retrospective of the German fashion designer's work.
Karl Lagerfeld is one of the International Woolmark Prize’s most celebrated alumni, having won the prize in 1954, when it was known as the International Wool Secretariat prize.
In recognition of Karl Lagerfeld’s association with wool, The Woolmark Company and US fashion brand Bode – which won the inaugural Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation as part of the 2020 International Woolmark Prize – teamed up to reimagine Karl Lagerfeld’s prize-winning wool coat from 1954, which was worn by Canadian designer, activist and author Aurora James at this year’s Met Gala. The Met Gala is one of the world’s most prestigious and glamorous fashion events.
There were 320+ earned media clippings about The Woolmark Company initiative, worth $2 million in value, with a reach of 2.3 billion people (the potential number of customers the campaign could reach).
This article appeared in the September 2023 edition of AWI’s Beyond the Bale magazine. Reproduction of the article is encouraged.
