RCA Fashion leader Zowie Broach named recipient of the 2024 Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education

Zowie Broach has been Head of Programme, MA Fashion at the Royal College of Art since 2015, and is an educator who has radically changed the paradigm of how we might design, act and think about fashion. As well as the Royal College of Art, Zowie has taught at the University of Westminster; Parsons New School for Design in New York; SAIC in Chicago; Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem; and from 2009 to 2011 was designer in residence at London College of Fashion. In her role as programme lead, she encourages her students to transcend the conventions pushing them to question their values, identity and aesthetic choices on a deeper level. The result is that fashion at the RCA today has radically changed, asking why we design, and how we act and think about fashion.

Zowie co-founded the avant-garde design studio and brand BOUDICCA, which was the first independent British label to show during Couture Paris, as well as exhibiting at Arts Institute of Chicago and the Tel Aviv Museum. More recently BOUDICCA featured as part of the London Design Museum’s REBEL: 30 years of London Fashion exhibition.

BOUDICCA, having staged the first ever fashion show to be live streamed back in 2004 by SHOWstudio, continued to investigate the digital interface as a tool, and the exploration of identity and material. Keeping her eye firmly on both present and future, Zowie is a principal investigator into whether machine intelligence can support and relate to the manual intelligence of Haute Couture. This relates strongly to the long-term consultation for Cartier she was part of, with a project about craft futurism.

Zowie Broach embraces fluidity of gender and identity, the merging of the physical and the digital, and bringing together different fields to create new futures and thought processes that go beyond the usual practice, challenging a new disruption to the industry from graduates asking them to question and impact a fashion future. Having been part of the Globalise Resistance protests at the turn of the century, she co-led the RCA Grand Challenge on what it means to be a future human.

She is a contributor to Neo Couture, a research project under the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, and collaboration between the Royal College of Art and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This research aims to explore how AI can be used in fashion and textile design with early concepts for digital material interactions that are informed by values critical to Haute Couture.

Zowie has been voted into the top 500 Fashion Leaders, Business of Fashion for the last 8 years.

Malcolm Garrett, Chairman of the Sir Misha Black Awards Committee, commented: "Zowie Broach’s innovative approach to fashion and education, questioning broader
concerns beyond the catwalk, consistently gives a refreshing re-appraisal of fashion practices, and inspires students and industry with an enduring relevance."

Zowie Broach said: "I say thank you so deeply that it booms across the sky, as this is thanks not only for the honour of even being considered for this award, but a thank you that resonates out to all those whom I have had the privilege to work alongside. Running with a fire horse you all did, and I am very grateful and certainly did not ride alone!"

The Award will be presented at a ceremony to be held at 6pm on Thursday 21 November, 2024 at Imperial College, London.

At the same time, the 2024 Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education will be awarded to Dr Patricia Moore, President of MooreDesign Associates and a dedicated educator, working with universities across the globe.

As a pioneering figure in design, she is a leading authority on consumer lifespan behaviours and requirements. For a period of three years from 1979 to 1982, in a daring experiment, Moore travelled throughout the United States and Canada disguised as women of more than 80 years of age. This experience of responding to people, products, and environments as an elder enabled an empathetic approach to design that informed much of her future work.

As a world-renowned champion of inclusive design, she is a long-standing friend of the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and kicked off the 2023 Design.Different season of events in conversation with the Centre’s Director Rama Gheerawo.

Since 1990, Moore has designed more than 300 Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Environments for healthcare facilities throughout North America, Europe, China and Japan. Named by ID Magazine in 1997 as one of the ‘40 Most Socially Conscious Designers’ in the world, Moore was selected in 2000 by a consortium of news editors and organisations as one of the ‘100 Most Important Women in America’.

Sir Misha Black was an industrial designer who with his partner Milner Gray, founded DRU (Design Research Unit) in the late 1940s. It became one of the first international, interdisciplinary design practices with major clients in industrial design, architecture and graphics. In 1959 Misha Black was appointed the first Professor of Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He was the most influential design teacher of his time, involved in international design affairs as well as being a gifted speaker and writer on design matters.