For designer Norma Kamali, the relationship between utility and style crystallized on a camping trip in the 1970s, when she wrapped herself in her sleeping bag for a bathroom run. “As I was running,” she recalled, “I was thinking, ‘I need to put sleeves on this thing,’” and the sleeping bag coat was born. Photographed throughout the 1980s for editorials featuring models in cocktail dresses and stilettos, the coat came across more like an avant-garde accessory rather than a re-imagining of a practical piece of outdoor equipment.

Additional text from

Fashion as Design online course, Coursera, 2017

Medium Nylon with fiber-filler
Dimensions 55 × 28 × depth (flat) 5 1/4" (139.7 × 71.1 × 13.3 cm)
Credit Gift of the designer
Object number 84.2018
Department Architecture & Design

Explore more

Licensing

Artwork or archival images

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

Audio and film clips

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.

Text from a publication or the archives

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.