2024 Sir Misha Black Award for Innovation in Design Education to be given to Zowie Broach of the Royal College of Art

The 1851 Royal Commission and the Sir Misha Black Awards Committee have announced that the 2024 Award for Innovation in Design Education is to be given to Zowie Broach of the RCA who as an educator, has radically changed the paradigm of how we might design, act and think about fashion.

Zowie Broach has been Head of Programme, MA Fashion at the Royal College of Art since 2015, having also taught at University of Westminster; Parsons New School for Design, New York; SAIC in Chicago; Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem; and from 2009 to 2011 as designer in residence at London College of Fashion. Previously she 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’.

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 longterm 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 graduate collections or fashion practices, challenging a new disruption to the industry from graduates across high luxury to research, questioning and impacting a fashion future. Having been part of the Globalise Resistance protests at the turn of the century, at RCA she co-led the Grand Challenge on what it means to be a future human. She is contributor to Neo Couture, a research project under the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, and collaboration between the Royal College of Art and the 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 Broach 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 refeshing re-appraisal of fashion practices, and inspires students and industry with an enduring relevance.”

Zowie Broach has commented: “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! ”