Ravishing Rose Symposium Speaker Biographies

Amy de la Haye is Professor of Dress History & Curatorship and Joint Director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has worked as a curator, interpreting museum collections and archives for thirty years; from 1990 to 1991 she was Curator of 20th Century Dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has published extensively on subjects including British fashion, curatorship and practices of collecting; the Women’s Land Army; subcultures; the Worth archive and is author of the V&A’s Clara Button books for children. Her next major project involves working, with Simon Costin, on a series of exhibitions on British folklore costume.

Jonathan Faiers is Professor of Fashion Thinking at the University of Southampton, UK, and he lectures internationally on the interface between popular culture, textiles and dress His publications include Tartan (Berg, 2008), Dressing Dangerously, Fur: A Sensitive History (both Yale University Press, 2013 and 2020) and essays for Alexander McQueen, London Couture (both V&A, 2015) and Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme (F.l.T./Thames & Hudson, 2017).

Colleen Hill is curator of costume and accessories at The Museum at FIT (MFIT). She holds an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice from FIT and is currently a PhD student at London College of Fashion. Since joining MFIT in 2006, Colleen has curated or co-curated more than a dozen exhibitions. Her upcoming shows include Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion and Reinvention and Restlessness: Fashion in the 90s. She has authored or co-authored seven books on fashion and contributed to numerous other publications.

Nick Knight OBE is one of the world's most visionary, innovative and creative image makers. Working primarily in the realms of fashion and style, these award-winning images have been instrumental in challenging conventional notions of beauty and identity. In order to champion fashion film and develop a forum to explore experimental technologies, he launched what was to become the award-winning SHOWStudio website in 2000. He has developed his passion for posting iPhone photographs of “Roses from my Garden” on Instagram to create major unique artworks that explore AI.

Mairi MacKenzie is a Research Fellow in Fashion and Textiles at Glasgow School of Art and a visiting lecturer at Glasglow University. Her current research is concerned with the relationship between popular music and fashion and social histories of perfume. She is author of Dream Suits: The Wonderful World of Nudie Cohn (Lannoo, 2011), Isms: Understanding Fashion (A&C Black, 2009), and Perfume and Fantasy: Scent in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Elizabeth Way is Assistant Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She co-curated the exhibitions, Global Fashion Capitals (2015) and Black Fashion Designers (2016), and curated Fabric In Fashion (2018). Upcoming exhibitions include Head to Toe and Food and Fashion. Way’s museum publications include: “Intersections of Movement and Style: African American Dance and Fashion in the Twentieth Century,” in Dance and Fashion (2013); and “Looking Back at the Future: Space Suits and Space Age Fashion” in Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme (2017), and she is co-editor of the Food and Fashion book (2022).