Sarah Jessica Parker becomes audio guide at The Met

Sarah Jessica Parker at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival for the premiere of Wonderful World. Photo by David Shankbone, obtained through Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

NEW YORK – Those who visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art during its exhibition titled American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity will be greeted by a familiar voice. Sex and the City star and self-confessed fashionista Sarah Jessica Parker has taken on the role of audio guide the Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibition at the museum.

The institute’s curator, Andrew Bolton, said of Parker: “Because of Sex and the City, [Parker] is so much associated with New York and with America, and with using fashion as a way to shape identity.”

American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity is the first Costume Institute exhibition drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met. It will explore developing perceptions of the modern American woman from 1890 to 1940 and how they have affected the way American women are seen today.

Focusing on archetypes of American femininity through dress, the exhibition will reveal how the American woman initiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sexual emancipation. “Gibson Girls,” “bohemians,” and “screen sirens,” among others, helped lay the foundation for today’s American woman.

The exhibition, which runs through Aug. 15, 2010, is made possible by Gap.
 Additional support is provided by Condé Nast.

Visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site at www.metmuseum.org to hear a sample of Sarah Jessica Parker’s audio narrative.

#  #  #