When Nadia Pinkney first opened the LinkedIn message from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she assumed it was a scam.
It was not. The art and fashion teacher from St David's High School in Dalkeith had been tracked down by Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Met's Costume Center, after his team went looking for fashion inspired by cognitive disorders. Their search led them to a graduate collection she had made nearly a decade earlier and stowed in a cardboard box in her classroom.
This week she is in New York, watching it hang alongside works spanning 5,000 years.
"It's been a whirlwind that my Remember Me Knot collection has made the news again," Ms Pinkney told BBC Scotland News. "I teach my pupils about Andrew Bolton and the Met Gala, and now he is a contact in my phone, which is very strange for an art teacher."
A family story stitched into every seam
Ms Pinkney created the six-piece collection in 2016 as a student at Heriot-Watt University. Both her great-grandmother and her grandmother had Alzheimer's disease, and she wanted to understand a condition she had grown up around but never fully grasped.
She worked with researchers and doctors who supplied her with brain scans, which she translated into the prints used across the garments. Knots and tangled fabrics run through every piece, a quiet reference to the way the disease tangles the brain's neurons.
The only colour she allowed herself was red.
"It was not only my great granny's favourite colour," she said, "but it represents the areas of the brain that are still active in PET scans."
From a box in the classroom to the Costume Center
Ms Pinkney left the fashion industry in 2021 and turned to teaching. Most of the collection had been kept at her grandfather's house; when he died three years ago, much of it was thrown out. What survived ended up in her art room.
One piece earmarked for the Met exhibition was no longer in the box, so she remade it from scratch earlier this year.
At the Costume Art exhibition, which opens to the public on 10 May, her work has been paired with a lithograph by the Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning, whose late-career work was shaped by his own Alzheimer's. The exhibition gathers some four hundred outfits and objects exploring bodies and identities that fashion has tended to overlook, among them the ageing body, which sits at the heart of Ms Pinkney's collection.
Pupils, parents and a small wardrobe crisis
Ms Pinkney travelled to New York with her mother for the opening of the exhibition and the new Condé Nast galleries. Even for a fashion graduate, the dress code provoked a moment of panic.
"The invitation said 'festive attire' but I didn't know what that meant," she said. She consulted ChatGPT, which advised "black tie but with personality". She has gone for a black trouser suit with silver detailing; her mother has chosen a similar cut in red.
"AI said it meant black tie but with personality, so I hope we fit in."
Back in Dalkeith, her pupils now have rather a striking case study to chew over: the teacher who told them about the Met Gala turned up in it, carrying a collection rooted in her own family's story. Few lessons in art history are likely to land more memorably than that.
