Our latest pre-order collection, Heroines, was designed in collaboration with the wonderful Elena Kanagy-Loux. If you’re someone who frequents online spaces focusing on sartorial history, you have likely heard of this super-cool person before. Today, we wanted to tell you a little more about Elena and the expertise she brought to our collaboration collection!
Elena (@erenanaomi on Instagram) is a lace-maker, historian, educator, artist, and founder of the Brooklyn Lace Guild. She is also currently working on her PhD at the Bard Graduate Centre. She has an MA in Costume Studies from NYU, focusing on interviews with European lace-makers. She teaches bobbin lace-making all over the place, and we hope to actually take a class someday!
For those who aren’t familiar, bobbin lace is a form of handmade lace that is made by weaving and twisting threads wound onto special bobbins. This process uses a lace pillow, with pins inserted into a pattern (or ‘pricking’) to guide the work- this is why bobbin lace is sometimes called “pillow lace”. In contrast to needle lace, which is made with a single needle and thread, bobbin lace relies on multiple threads worked at the same time. Elena posed with one of her lace pillows in our shoot for the Heroines collection!
Bobbin lace is an art that Elena is helping to preserve. Through her academic work, lace-making workshops, and social media content, Elena makes lace-making accessible to modern audiences and helps us to connect with a crafting legacy that could otherwise be in danger of being lost. Of course, all of us at American Duchess are passionate about the preservation of crafts like lace-making, so we find this work really admirable.
Something especially important about Elena’s work with regards to lace-making is that it reminds us that these crafts are labor-intensive, artisan-level practices that have historically been used and preserved by working-class women. When women’s work in crafting spaces has been so consistently devalued through history, discussing the socio-economic context of crafts like lace-making is crucial. Fashion history is so intersectional, and this is especially evident when we look at crafting practices like sewing, dressmaking, and lace-making.
Elena has been featured in all sorts of publications, including (but not limited to) Vogue, Teen Vogue, Bust, the New York Times,and Marie Claire. She has participated in several museum collections, and has been commissioned to create pieces for exhibits as well. She was even commissioned to create a collar for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg!
Something else that we just love about Elena is her incredible personal style. Hyper-feminine, maximalist, historically-influenced, colorful and fun are just some of the adjectives we would use to describe it! We used inspirational factors from Elena’s personal style, along with her aesthetic and color palette, to inform the design choices of our Heroines collection styles. For example, the darling floral print used in Adelaide, the maximalist design of our Pearl Buckles, and the shimmery, cheeky opalescent leather used for the Artemisia shoes.
Elena styled her Adelaides, Isabellas, and Artemisias with some really cool, colorful, and imaginative ensembles with plenty of historic influence.
Elena does really important work for the preservation of historical craft. We were honoured to get to work with her on this collection, which pays tribute to some of the historical women in the arts who have inspired us through the ages. This collection is so special!
The Heroines by Elena Kanagy-Loux collection is 15% off each pair on pre-order through June 1. You just have to decide which colors to get!
Pre-Order is Open
May 16 – June 1
15% Discount Per Pair
AmericanDuchess.com
