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about scad
The Savannah College of Art and Design is a private,
nonprofit, accredited institution conferring bachelor’s and
master’s degrees at distinctive locations to prepare talented
students for professional careers. SCAD offers degrees in
more than 40 majors, as well as minors in more than 60 disciplines.
With 32,000 alumni worldwide, SCAD demonstrates
an exceptional education and unparalleled career preparation.
At locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; in Hong
Kong; in Lacoste, France; and online through SCAD
eLearning, the diverse student body consists of more than
12,000 students, from across the United States and over
100 countries. SCAD’s innovative curriculum is enhanced
by advanced, professional-level technology, equipment and
learning resources. Curricular collaborations with companies
and organizations including Google and the National Council
of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) affirm the
professional currency SCAD champions in its programs.
The university, students, faculty and alumni have garnered
acclaim from respected organizations and publications
worldwide including four consecutive years of No. 1 rankings
for the undergraduate interior design program by DesignIntelligence,
recognition as one of the 2014 Red Dot Design
Rankings’ top 10 universities in the Americas and Europe, and
the No. 1 graduate fashion program in the U.S. as determined
by London-based Business of Fashion. For more information,
visit the official SCAD blog.
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.
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SCAD FASH celebrates fashion as a universal language, garments as important conduits
of identity, and film as an immersive and memorable medium. Situated within the SCAD
Atlanta campus at 1600 Peachtree St., SCAD FASH focuses on the future of fashion design,
connecting conceptual to historical principles of dress — whether ceremonial, celebratory or
casual — and welcomes visitors of all ages to engage with dynamic exhibitions, captivating
films and educationally enriching events.
Fortified by the university’s strong global presence and
worldwide connections to renowned contemporary fashion
designers, filmmakers and creative professionals all over
the world, SCAD FASH is an integral part of the SCAD
educational experience.
Like the award-winning SCAD Museum of Art, SCAD FASH
serves as a teaching museum and creative resource for students
of all ages and a wellspring of inspiration for visitors. Through
programming that engages the university’s broad array of
academic disciplines — encompassing more than 40 majors
and 60 minors — SCAD FASH offers a diverse, year-round
program of exhibitions, films, installations, performances and
events to enliven and inspire SCAD students and the greater
community. Every program is designed to engage and appeal
to visitors with varied backgrounds and interests, from textiles
and jewelry to photography and film.
Within nearly 10,000 square feet of elegant and adaptable
exhibition space, SCAD FASH brings a dynamic and distinct
schedule of fashion-focused exhibitions and compelling films
to the heart of Midtown Atlanta. Beyond its extensive gallery
space, SCAD FASH includes a fashion resource room for the
presentation of techniques and materials, a state-of-the-art
media lounge for educational film and digital presentations,
collections storage, and a new grand entrance and lobby. An
additional 27,000 square feet of academic and studio space
also surrounds the perimeter of the museum, providing
students immediate access to the museum and its resources.
Throughout the year at each of its locations around the world,
SCAD hosts a spectacular lineup of thought-provoking,
sparkling, star-studded events that place art and design
education front and center. SCAD FASH promotes valuable
career-building connections and continues this rich tradition
by affording students and professors across all disciplines the
opportunity to celebrate works of wearable art and remarkable
filmmaking, and to interact with the renowned and emerging
creative professionals who create them.
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contents
the designers
Oscar De La Renta
page eight
Carolina Herrera
page fourteen
the photographers
Bill Cunningham
page twenty eight
Jonathan Becker
page thirty eight
Leadership
page forty four
Visit
page forty six
Membership
page forty eight
Oscar De La Renta gown designed for Oprah Winfrey to wear at the Met Gala, 2010.
Photo courtesy of Getty Dimitrios Kambouris/filmmagic, SCAD.

Backstage at Oscar De La Renta Winter 2015 Show.
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.
4

THE
designers
5

OSCAR DE LA RENTA
6

CAROLINA HERRERA
SCAD FASH presented “Oscar de la Renta,” the inaugural
exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s
new museum of fashion. “Oscar de la Renta” celebrates the
illustrious life and designs of the storied couturier whose
work set the standard for timeless elegance, and it also
introduces the work of Peter Copping, the talented designer
personally selected by de la Renta to lead the iconic brand
into the future.
The SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion + Film and the
SCAD Museum of Art present “Refined Irreverence,” a
dual exhibition celebrating Carolina Herrera and the 35th
anniversary of the House of Herrera. The exhibition marks
the first museum showing of Herrera’s work. Featuring new
and vintage designs from Herrera’s 1981 inaugural collection
to the present, “Refined Irreverence” includes more than 75
garments showcasing the designer’s modern, dynamic classics.
Oscar De La Renta Spring/Summer 2013 Show. Photo courtesy of Harper's 7 Bazaar.
Carolina Herrera Spring 2016 Show. Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.

Photo courtesy of Fashion Sizzle.
8

OSCAR
DE LA
RENTA
THE LAVISH LEGACY LIVES ON
9

DE LA RENTA
“Oscar de la Renta,” the inaugural
SCAD FASH exhibition, celebrated the
illustrious life and designs of the storied
couturier whose work set the standard
for timeless elegance. The momentous
exhibition featured more than 60
garments, including those designed for
Hollywood A-listers Oprah Winfrey,
Nicole Kidman and Taylor Swift, as well
as former first lady Laura Bush. “Oscar
de la Renta” also introduced the work
of Peter Copping, the talented designer
personally selected by de la Renta to
lead the iconic brand into the future.
Additionally, “Ovation for Oscar,” a
short documentary created by SCAD
alumni and students that premiered at
the Cannes Film Festival earlier this
year, was part of the exhibition.
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.
10

Photo courtesy of Fashion Sizzle.
“THE 21ST CENTURY IS THE CENTURY OF THE WOMAN,”
said Oscar de la Renta in 2010. You can see this declaration
manifested throughout his work, and throughout his current
retrospective at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. His
designs, known for their boldness, femininity and opulence,
require a woman to be comfortable taking center stage,
whether it’s in a full floral ballgown, vibrant kaftan or an
embellished tunic.
It’s no surprise then that powerful women from the realms of
both politics and pop culture have continuously been loyal
clients of the designer throughout his career, from presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton to pop star Taylor Swift. At the
end of the day, women — and how they felt in his clothes —
were always what drove his vision.
“I believe that my sole purpose as a designer is to create
something that I think a woman would want to wear,” said de
la Renta in 1972.
Although there are more than 120 ensembles produced
over five decades on display, every piece seems to make
one unifying assertion: “Look at me.” His work embraces a
singular expression of womanhood, reveling in its aspects of
adornment, attention and drama. If all the world’s a stage, de
la Renta’s clothes are what you’d want to be wearing for your
moment in the spotlight.
While the retrospective highlights his global influences, from
East to West, it also conveys his overarching American attitude
toward change. The Dominican Republic-born designer
refined his craft in Paris but left for this reason: “I’d come
to New York because I believed the future of fashion was in
ready-to-wear.”
“Over the course of his career, he mixed an incredible
sensibility of ready-to-wear and haute couture, creating demi
couture, an amazing synthesis of both,” Richard Benefield,
the de Young’s Acting Director and Exhibition Organizer,
11

DE LA RENTA
“
I believe that my sole
purpose as a designer
is to create something
that I think a woman
would want to wear.”
−OSCAR DE LA RENTA
explained to The Huffington Post. “Oscar could do it all —
whatever was the most fashionable at the moment, he’d do it
with his distinctive flair and eye for aesthetics.”
Like a story out of a fashion fairy tale, on his very first night in
Manhattan, de la Renta met cosmetics mogul Elizabeth Arden,
who offered him a job the following morning designing
haute couture gowns for her design house. Two years later, he
started his own collection bearing his name.
His legendary status doesn’t end there — in fact, it was just
building. In 1973, he represented the United States as one of
five designers at the notorious “Battle of Versailles” fashion
show, a competition between French and American designers.
De la Renta and the other Americans were a sensation, challenging
old-world European haute couture with their readyto-wear
designs.
clothes during that time reflected American might and confidence.
“In the eighties, it was back into rich, opulent clothes,
which were my thing,” he’s said.
After the 1980s, the designer was always forward-thinking
though, especially when it came to looking to diverse cultures
for inspiration, including Chinese embroideries, Indian
textiles, Uzbek and Kazakh ikat-patterned cloths, Japanese
woodblock prints,and traditional Russian fabrics and ornamentation.
“Today, people — clothes — are international.
Frontiers are non-existent,” de la Renta says.
His sentiments, like his clothes, feel eternally modern yet
timeless. “Oscar de la Renta: The Retrospective” presents the
life and legacy of a man who loved life and encourages you
to celebrate it, too. With the show’s lush exuberance, it’s an
invitation that’s hard to resist.
With a career-long retrospective, it’s easy to see that the 1980s
were the designer’s spiritual and aesthetic home. His bold
ARTICLE BY TRICIA TONGCO
12

DE LA RENTA
Photo courtesy of The Huffington Post.
Amal Alamuddin at her final fitting with Oscar de la Renta, 2014. Photo courtesy of ABCNews.
13

CAROLINA
HERRERA’S
14

quiet path to power
The SCAD FASH Museum of Fashion
+ Film and the SCAD Museum of Art
present “Refined Irreverence,” a dual
exhibition celebrating Carolina Herrera
and the 35th anniversary of the House
of Herrera. The exhibition marks
the first museum showing of Herrera’s
work. Featuring new and vintage
designs from Herrera’s 1981 inaugural
collection to the present, “Refined
Irreverence” includes more than 75
garments showcasing the designer’s
modern, dynamic classics.
Since launching her first collection in
1981 at the behest of legendary Vogue
editor Diana Vreeland, Venezuelan-born
Herrera has become synonymous
with effortless elegance and modern
refinement. “I have a responsibility to
the woman of today — to make her
feel confident, modern and above all
else beautiful,” Herrera said. Curated
by Rafael Gomes, SCAD director of
fashion exhibitions, “Refined Irreverence”
includes runway looks, day wear,
and bridal and red-carpet gowns worn
by Michelle Obama, Taylor Swift, Lady
Gaga, Tina Fey, Renée Zellweger and
Lucy Liu, as well as ensembles from
Herrera’s personal collection.
15
Carolina Herrera Spring/Summer 2016 Show, Carolina Herrera.
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.

HERRERA
HERRERA was drawn to the museum’s imposing beauty that goes against the grain of the ultracool, frenzied, downtown
venue approach to shows that dominates the New York calendar. But if the Garden Court weren’t easy to enter
and exit, she would have passed. “I don’t like elevators, all right?” Herrera says. “Everybody asked why did I stay at
Lincoln Center [so long]? Because it’s convenient, people arrive and go directly to the show. Because it’s not fair with all of you
going to the shows to be [delayed] at an elevator to go and sit for an hour and then run to another elevator.”
When she had to depart Lincoln Center, Herrera mulled
possibilities that would resonate as interesting yet keep the
focus on the clothes. The Frick, long one of her favorite New
York haunts, came to mind. “It’s not a huge spectacle. It’s a
beautiful place and you don’t have to do a lot of [set] decorations
or anything because everything is there. So that’s the
way, that’s why we ended up there.”
The lady is a pragmatist, a distinction worn with genuine
patrician glamour. And she is a survivor. Along with Ralph
Lauren, Herrera alone remains as a founding presence of the
generation of designers that put American designer fashion
on the map. Yet unlike Lauren, she is a royalty-collecting
employee at the huge company — some would say surprisingly
huge — that bears her name. Barcelona-based Puig
launched Herrera’s first fragrance in 1988 and bought the
company outright in 1995. In 2012, the last time for which the
firm has released figures, Puig put 2011 consolidated global
retail sales for Herrera’s fragrance and fashion at $1.3 billion.
In this age of the designer carousel, the Herrera-Puig relationship
presents as a rare ideal. “Puig is a family business.
That gives you confidence,” Herrera says. “We understand
each other very well. They’re very respectful of what I do,
I’m in the creative side of this company. I’m not the business
side. You ask me what is my business, I don’t have the slightest
idea.”On that point, Herrera indulges in a false modesty.
Running the business side falls to chief executive officer
Carolina Herrera Spring/Summer 2016 Ready-to-Wear Collection.
Photo courtesy of The Style of the Case: Fashion Law.
16

Carolina Herrera Spring 2015 Show.
Photo courtesy of Harper's Bazaar.
17

HERRERA
“
Fashion must be for
today... You have to
be run by your idea
of what you want to
show... design with
your eyes open.”
−CAROLINA HERRERA
François Kress, who joined the firm last March after a tenure
as global president of Stuart Weitzman LLC, and prior stints
at The Row, Prada and LVMH. But Herrera understands one
of its most essential commandments: Know thyself.
The designer’s aesthetic has hardly remained static, evolving
through the years from early flamboyance to a more measured
take on decorative chic. Yet she has resisted the temptation to
veer too dramatically from her elegant, adult perspective in
pursuit of the elusive, some would say imaginary, young client
that so many houses seek, often alienating their core constituencies
in the process. As she approaches her brand’s 35th anniversary,
a mark about which she’s not particularly emotional
(she doesn’t like anniversaries and birthdays), a consistency
of vision marks her work. “I don’t change the style of the
company every six months,” Herrera says. “I think it’s the
saddest thing when you see a fashion company that has been
around for years and they try to be very young and change and
do things they never did [before], trying to attract younger
people. You have to do the right things for the [company]. It’s
sad when you see” a company known for a more discreet take
on fashion, suddenly go “very tight and cool and black leather
like Saint Laurent.
“Fashion must be for today,” she continues. “That doesn’t
mean I’m going to go to an extreme, with black leather
leggings, or all naked. You cannot be naked. You cannot be
run by the red carpet. You cannot be run by Instagram. You
have to be run by your idea of what you want to show…design
with your eyes open. Make it contemporary but don’t confuse
people.”Herrera’s spring collection, one of her loveliest ever,
speaks to that position. A study in sophisticated delicacy, she
worked airy pink fabrics with varying degrees of transparency,
her goal a lineup that was “a little nude but not obvious,” that
would play to the romanticism of the space, “like a fantasy. It
had to move, it had to be light, it had to be like butterflies. I
was very happy with it.”
Recently, she has been very taken with techno foam fabrics,
integrating them seamlessly into her elegant vision. Versions
with various 3-D floral motifs will play prominently in her
fall collection. One features graphic, raised embroideries of
jasmine, Herrera’s favorite flower, its scent a note in her first
fragrance. “I’m always investigating the new techniques to use
in a feminine way, and making women look beautiful for now,
for today. That is my job.”
Fabrics aren’t the only way in which Herrera is embracing
technology. Her upcoming show will be live-streamed with a
360-degree feed on the brand’s Web site, and the company is
growing its social media presence, primarily on Instagram.
As for overall growth, patience has long driven the strategy,
one proven savvy over time, the company’s overall sales
ballooning almost under the radar. The fragrance alone has
more than 25,000 points of sale around the world, and the
CH brand is broadly distributed across North America, Iberia
and the Middle East, including 129 freestanding stores. By
18

HERRERA
comparison, the signature Carolina Herrera is small and
focused on wholesale as opposed to a dense network of brand
stores. It has only three, in New York, Dallas and Los Angeles.
Under Kress’ stewardship, the push is on to grow that business
significantly, with the primary focus on Europe and
North America.
Carolina Herrera Spring 2015 Show.
Photo courtesy of The Fashion Foot.
“You have to analyze everything and have perseverance,”
Herrera says. “Do you want to open stores in places where
they don’t know you and you don’t know if things will sell, or
are just going to open them because of your ego? The fashion
world is a lot of egos. I don’t mind waiting. I want to do things
right, when we are ready. This is the right time to have Carolina
Herrera all over Europe.”
At the same time, growth involves more intimate gestures
as well, and the company is open to one-off or short-term
collaborations. This week, a capsule exclusive to Jeffrey New
York hit the selling floor; it features seven styles in graphic
black-and-white dots that riff on the packaging of the brand’s
first fragrance. A second such collaboration, with Mytheresa.
com, is set for May. “They’re very focused; they know exactly
what they need,” Herrera says. “It’s a joy to work with people
like that.”
Herrera took a gradual path to becoming a major fashion
industry force. She grew up in a world of privilege in Caracas,
one in which fashion was not viewed as particularly significant.
Discipline defined the family ethos in which she and
19

HERRERA
her two sisters were raised. Though she soaked up knowledge
subliminally while looking at her mother’s pretty clothes,
Herrera’s conscious self was far more concerned with studying
the pursuits of a well-bred young lady, both intellectual, such
as art and history, and active — riding and tennis. For years,
she quips, her tennis instructor was the most important person
in her life. She also took cues from her governess, a refined
Hungarian woman who taught her French and English. As
a teenager, Herrera began to explore style as an interest and
fodder for experimentation; she has often said that when she
discovered American screen sirens, she wanted to be a vamp.
All of that combined with good old-fashioned luck — she’s
gorgeous — coalesced into Herrera’s signature glamour, worn
with white-shirted control and impeccable carriage. And very
naturally. Herrera seems, in every discernible way, devoid of
artifice. As she and her second husband, Reinaldo Herrera,
traveled, often to New York, they became regulars at haunts
including Studio 54, and she, on the international society
pages.
“That was so much fun, New York in the Seventies,” she says.
“You were mixed with a lot of creative people, talent, in the
art world, in society, literature, in the movie business. Actors,
actresses, musicians, they were all mixed. You used to go to
dinners and find everybody together. It was fun. I loved it.”
At some point during her enviable itinerant ways, Herrera
decided she had something to offer women like herself in
terms of fashion, chic women with tony lifestyles. She wanted
to open a fashion house. Her friend Halston, who by then had
experienced a series of woes, advised her otherwise. “What did
you drink, are you mad? You can’t!” he admonished.
Undeterred, Herrera forged on. Just past 40 and the mother
of four daughters, she would forge an enviable life as a
working woman, achieving what appears from the outside a
near perfect work-life balance. In aggregate, her daughters
Mercedes, Ana Luisa, Carolina and Patricia have made her
a grandmother 12 times over (each has three children), and
surely the most glamorous great-grandmother on Earth — a
status about which Herrera makes no effort to hide. “Why
should I?” she muses. “I don’t avoid it. I think every age has
benefits and limitations. No? You should try to develop each
one at the proper time.”
About the time Herrera was mulling opening a business
(counseled in the affirmative by none other than Diana
Vreeland, a family friend), she attended a party. Someone
pointed out Armando de Armas, the publishing magnate
whose Miami-based portfolio included the Spanish language
Harper’s Bazaar. A recent cover of the magazine had featured a
paparazzi photo of Herrera. She went over to thank him, and
before the conversation was over, he had offered to invest in
her still nonexistent business. Herrera staged her first show at
the Metropolitan Club for fall 1981, with a band playing Cole
Porter. Steve Rubell was turned away at the door for want of a
necktie; he returned and was welcomed after a quick Bergdorf
Goodman run. All of the big stores — Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf’s,
Saks Fifth Avenue — came and wrote orders.
Despite the seeming worldliness of her operation, as a businessperson,
Herrera was green. She recalls of her first trunk
show that she didn’t grasp the lingo: “I didn’t know it was
called a trunk show because you transported the clothes in a
trunk.” She also had to turn down an offer of windows from
the legendary Park Avenue retailer Martha. Before the Metropolitan
show, Herrera had worked up a small collection “with
20

“It is a great privilege to fête 35
years of Herrera’s timeless elegance,
and to engage SCAD students with
a designer par excellence,” said Paula
Wallace. “Her artistry reflects a
refined sensibility that is at once
classic and modern. Every woman
who wears her designs feels exactly as
Carolina intends: beautiful.”
HERRERA
Illustration used with permission of David Downton.
21

HERRERA
Carolina Herrera Ready To Wear, Fall/Winter 2015 Show.
Photo courtesy of The Who and What.
22

HERRERA
my French couturier in Venezuela.” Vreeland suggested she
take it to Martha, who offered windows. Herrera was about
to jump when a friend pointed out that she couldn’t; she had
not a piece to sell beyond the sample line. Still, she notes,
“Martha, queen of fashion at the moment, wanted to put some
dresses in the window. That was good.”
So, too, was her partnership with De Armas, through which
the business got established for real. They remained together
until he decided he wanted out of fashion. Together they sold
the company outright to Puig.
Simpler times, despite the learning curve. Now, like just about
everyone else in fashion, Herrera thinks the industry machine
has spun wantonly out of control. Too many shows, too many
seasons. “The client, the woman that buys,” Herrera muses,
“do you think they want to buy so much? Do you think they
need all that? Do you think they have time to think, ‘I need
something special that I don’t have?’ Or is it just more, ‘OK,
whatever?'”
She’s open to the rapidly trending concept of consumer-timed
shows — “it’s a good idea if we can again create some mystery”
— but sees potential creative pratfalls in having to make
production commitments in advance of the major-season
shows. “It’s very complicated,” she says, while acknowledging
it’s the way of today’s fashion world. “We have to accept it and
work it out in a way that works for everyone, for us, designers,
people who are the clients and for women who want to look
beautiful.” Despite the industry upheaval, Herrera still loves
her work, particularly working with her two youngest daughters.
“It’s fabulous,” she offers. “First of all, they don’t lie. A
lot of people are afraid to tell the truth.” Carolina works in
fragrance from her base in Madrid; Patricia, in the design
studio. “She’s like a thermometer,” Herrera maintains.
As the company grows, fragrance remains in the forefront of
the strategy. It brought Herrera together with Puig in the first
place, and remains highly successful. “Every designer should
have a scent,” Herrera says. “If it’s successful, it’s amazing. It
helps with everything. You are everywhere in a little bottle
that people buy.”
Another area close to her heart: bridal. The category has
plenty of challenges — MOBs at the top of the list. Having
been on both sides of that coin — mother to four brides and
designer to countless others — Herrera offers advice sprung
from that innate pragmatism. She urges bridal customers
to do their initial scouting on their own, unburdened of the
opinions of moms and other well-intentioned potential irritants.
Yet in the end, pragmatism takes a backseat to all of the
emotion concentrated in the symbolism of a wedding gown,
even to this most worldly professional. “I love bridal, always,”
Herrera says. “You know why I love it? Because it’s full of
hope and love.”
ARTICLE BY BRIDGET FOLEY
23

Photograph courtesy of Witold Riedel.
24

HERRERA
my French couturier in Venezuela.” Vreeland suggested she
take it to Martha, who offered windows. Herrera was about
to jump when a friend pointed out that she couldn’t; she had
not a piece to sell beyond the sample line. Still, she notes,
“Martha, queen of fashion at the moment, wanted to put some
dresses in the window. That was good.”
So, too, was her partnership with De Armas, through which
the business got established for real. They remained together
until he decided he wanted out of fashion. Together they sold
the company outright to Puig.
Simpler times, despite the learning curve. Now, like just about
everyone else in fashion, Herrera thinks the industry machine
has spun wantonly out of control. Too many shows, too many
seasons. “The client, the woman that buys,” Herrera muses,
“do you think they want to buy so much? Do you think they
need all that? Do you think they have time to think, ‘I need
something special that I don’t have?’ Or is it just more, ‘OK,
whatever?'”
She’s open to the rapidly trending concept of consumer-timed
shows — “it’s a good idea if we can again create some mystery”
— but sees potential creative pratfalls in having to make
production commitments in advance of the major-season
shows. “It’s very complicated,” she says, while acknowledging
it’s the way of today’s fashion world. “We have to accept it and
work it out in a way that works for everyone, for us, designers,
people who are the clients and for women who want to look
beautiful.” Despite the industry upheaval, Herrera still loves
her work, particularly working with her two youngest daughters.
“It’s fabulous,” she offers. “First of all, they don’t lie. A
lot of people are afraid to tell the truth.” Carolina works in
fragrance from her base in Madrid; Patricia, in the design
studio. “She’s like a thermometer,” Herrera maintains.
As the company grows, fragrance remains in the forefront of
the strategy. It brought Herrera together with Puig in the first
place, and remains highly successful. “Every designer should
have a scent,” Herrera says. “If it’s successful, it’s amazing. It
helps with everything. You are everywhere in a little bottle
that people buy.”
Another area close to her heart: bridal. The category has
plenty of challenges — MOBs at the top of the list. Having
been on both sides of that coin — mother to four brides and
designer to countless others — Herrera offers advice sprung
from that innate pragmatism. She urges bridal customers
to do their initial scouting on their own, unburdened of the
opinions of moms and other well-intentioned potential irritants.
Yet in the end, pragmatism takes a backseat to all of the
emotion concentrated in the symbolism of a wedding gown,
even to this most worldly professional. “I love bridal, always,”
Herrera says. “You know why I love it? Because it’s full of
hope and love.”
ARTICLE BY BRIDGET FOLEY
23

BILL CUNNINGHAM
General Motors Building, ca. 1968-1976. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society
26

JONATHAN BECKER
Zac Posen at home, New York, February 2008
This inaugural showing of Cunningham’s 66 historic
photographs and an original program, on loan to
SCAD FASH from the private collection of Nancy
North, a model who walked in the famed fashion
show, illustrates the moment that American design
houses became the international arbiters of style and
celebrates the glamour and excitement of the day.
The exhibition, Becker’s first museum retrospective
in more than 30 years, was originally presented at
the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah and included
a selection of new photographs for SCAD FASH
Museum of Fashion + Film..
27

SCAD FASH is pleased to
present “Grand Divertissement à
Versailles, Vintage Photographs by
Bill Cunningham,” an exhibition
featuring exclusive, vintage images
of the legendary 1973 fashion show,
“The Battle of Versailles,” taken by
acclaimed fashion photographer,
Bill Cunningham. This exhibition
showcases Cunningham’s unique
perspective as a staff photographer
for The New York Times and as an
icon of New York and international
fashion, having contributed significantly
to fashion journalism with his
writing and photography for over
half a century.
Bill Cunningham, 57th and 5th Avenue, 2011.
Photo courtesy of Lenzartis.
28

ill cunningham takes manhattan
Afew summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill
Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman,
in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair— not
the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the
irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry detergent. The woman
gave Cunningham an idea. Every day for a month, whenever
he saw something cerulean (a batik shawl) or aqua (a Hawaiian-print
sarong) or azure (a Japanese parasol) coming down
the sidewalk, he snapped a picture of it. One morning, he
spotted a worker balancing, on his shoulder, a stuffed blue
marlin. “I thought, That’s it, kid!” he recently recalled. The
following Sunday, “On the Street,” the street-fashion column
that Cunningham has maintained in the Times for more than
a decade, was populated entirely with New Yorkers dressed in
various shades of the color—a parade of human paint chips.
“Mediterranean shades of blue are not yet the new pink, but
they are a favorite this summer,” he wrote. “The cooling
watery tones, worn as an accent with white and browns,
appear in turquoise-color jewelry and blue hair, but it is rare
to see a man crossing the Avenue of the Americas with a
trophy sailfish.”
Cunningham’s job is not so different from a fisherman’s: it
requires a keen knowledge, honed over years, of the local
ecosystem and infinite patience in all manner of weather
conditions. His first big catch was an accident. It was 1978,
and a woman wearing a nutria coat had caught his eye. “I
thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’
“ he later wrote. “And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at
it and think: ‘Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing.’ “ Cunningham
shot frame after frame of the coat, eventually noticing that
other people on the sidewalk were paying attention to its
wearer. It was Greta Garbo. Cunningham showed the pictures,
along with some shots of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney
(whom he recognized), Farrah Fawcett (whom he didn’t, not
owning
“On the Street”—along with Cunningham’s society column,
“Evening Hours”—is New York’s high-school yearbook, an
exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of
the way we looked. Class of 1992: velvet neck ribbons, leopard
prints, black jeans, catsuits, knotted shirts, tote bags, berets
(will they ever come back, after Monica?). Class of 2000: clamdiggers,
beaded fringe, postcard prints, jean jackets, fish-net
stockings, flower brooches (this was the height of “Sex and
the City”). The column, in its way, is as much a portrait of
New York at a given moment in time as any sociological tract
or census—a snapshot of the city. On September 16, 2001,
Cunningham ran a collage of signs (“OUR FINEST HOUR,”
“WE ARE STRONGER NOW”) and flags (on bandannas, on
buildings, on bikes) that makes one as sad and proud, looking
at it now, as it did when it was published. So far this year, he
has identified vogues for picture- frame collars, microminis,
peg-legged pants, and the color gray (“often with a dash of
sapphire or violet,” in the manner of the Edwardians). His
columns are frequently playful —he once featured a woman,
near the Plaza, walking three standard poodles, “an unmatched
set in pink, turquoise, and white”—but they also convey an
29

CUNNINGHAM
elegiac respect for the anonymous promenade of life in a big
city, and a dead-serious desire to get it all down.
For two groups of New Yorkers—the fashionable people,
whose style changes more rapidly than that of the masses, and
the truly creative ones, whose style, while outré, in its theatricality
never really changes at all—“On the Street” is also a
family album. The magazine editors Anna Wintour, Cecilia
Dean, and Carine Roitfeld and the society dermatologist Lisa
Airan are regulars on the page, as are Tziporah Salamon (her
Web site showcases her eight appearances in Cunningham’s
column, including one—a Capri- pants montage—in which
only her legs are visible), and Louise Doktor, a midtown
executive secretary, whose experimental outfits Cunningham
has been documenting from afar for twenty-five years. “She
once bought a coat with four sleeves!” he told me. At a party
thrown last season at Bergdorf Goodman to celebrate the
decoration of the store’s windows in Cunningham’s honor,
guests included not only the police commissioner, Ray
Kelly, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the Times
(“You’re great! This is a really big thing,” he said, grabbing
Cunningham, who had shown up at his behest, by the shoulders),
but a woman wearing, on her head, what looked like
one of those blue pompoms from a car wash, and a man with a
Swiss-dot veil drawn in ink on his forehead.
Cunningham, who turns eighty this month, is an annual presence
at certain society events: the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade,
the Central Park Conservancy luncheon, the Hampton Classic
Horse Show. This winter, at the ice-skating rink in Central
Park, he took pictures of the children of the children whose
parents he once shot outside Maxim’s took pictures of the
children of the children whose parents he once shot outside
Maxim’s and at the Hotel Pierre (where, at a dinner dance
in 1984, he captured thirty-three women in similar Fabrice
beaded gowns). His vocabulary (“Cheers, child!”) and his
diction (“Mrs. Oh-nah-sis”) are those of a more genteel era—
the weekly audio slideshow he does for the Times offers many
of the pleasures of a Lomax recording—but he rarely goes for
the easy grip-and-grin shot. His sensibility is exhilaratingly
democratic. He takes wonder, or whimsy, where he finds it,
chronicling the Obama Inauguration, the Puerto Rican Day
Parade, Wigstock, and the snowman sweatshirts and reindeer
turtlenecks of tourists; the do-rag and the way that, at one
point in 2000, many young hip-hop fans spontaneously took
to wearing their sweatshirts abstractly, with the neck hole on
the shoulder, or with the sleeves dangling down the back. (He
related the phenomenon to both the Japanese deconstructionists
and the sideways baseball cap.)
The four corners of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street
are some of Cunningham’s favorite shoals. One bright afternoon,
he was there, as he has been for countless hours, casting
about for inspiration. “I have an idea what I’m going to do this
week,” he said. (What that was he refused to say.) “I’ve got to
face the bullet very quickly. If it doesn’t have enough depth, I
should wait.” It was a crackerjack day. “Look at the style you
have here!” Cunningham said. “Stay here on Fifth Avenue and
you see the whole world. Summertime—the vacationers and
the Europeans. The holidays—everyone from the Midwest,
the West, Japan. They’re all here, the whole world!”
Cunningham lives alone in the Carnegie Hall Tower, one of
the last tenants in a formerly vast complex of artists’ studios,
without a private bathroom or cooking facilities. His bed
consists of a piece of foam, a wooden board, and several milk
crates. Nearby is a metal file cabinet crammed with decades’
worth of negatives. (Trip Gabriel, the editor of the Times’
30

CUNNINGHAM
Photograph courtesy of Richard Press, 2011.
Sunday Styles section, where Cunningham’s column appears,
told me that when Cunningham goes to the Paris collections
“our reporters are staying right in the First Arrondissement,
sometimes at the Ritz, and Bill insists on staying at a cheapo
hotel that has no phones in the rooms.” To make a reservation,
he sends a postcard.) “When I fall out of bed in the
morning, I can come over here and get up my adrenaline,”
Cunningham said, blowing his nose into a deli napkin that he
produced from a pocket of the blue workman’s smock that he
customarily wears, as if to say, in solidarity with the hot-dog
venders and delivery boys amid whom he spends his days, that
his office is the street. Around his neck was a battered Nikon.
Its strap was held together with duct tape. Cunningham has
often been described as a fashion monk, but he is closer to
an oblate—a layperson who has dedicated his life to the tribe
without becoming a part of it. A friend of Cunningham’s
told Artforum in 1996, “One of Bill’s favorite sayings, when
anyone starts taking the fashion scene too seriously, is ‘Oops,
you’re falling into the traps of the rich.’ “ In a recent column,
examining the way New Yorkers dress for wet weather,
31

CUNNINGHAM
Cunningham poked fun at “the snobs,” who “are so above it
all, they think the waters will part for them even as they sink
to their ankles.”
Behind Cunningham, the windows of Bergdorf ’s were
festooned with blow-ups of his columns. Linda Fargo, the
store’s vice-president of visual merchandising, said it had
taken ten years to persuade Cunningham to agree to the
exhibit. “Bill is not somebody you can ever press yourself on,”
Fargo said. “I once, to thank him for something, gave him a
very small box of chocolates, and he personally delivered it
back to my office two days later.” There was confetti made
from shredded newspapers. “I’m delighted, but also a little
embarrassed, because you try to be invisible, and this blows
your cover!” Cunningham said, hoisting the Nikon to his eye
and darting off, mid- sentence, in pursuit of a woman with a
fetching fur-lined handbag.
“Luckily, you can slip back into being anonymous very
quickly,” he continued, once he’d returned. “I don’t really see
people—I see clothes. People say everybody’s a slob. Ridiculous!
There are marvellously”—it came out, in a wonderful
archaic honk, as “maah- vah-lously”—“dressed women you
see at a quarter to eight, going to business. When people say
fashion is no more, they’re ridiculous! It’s as good as it ever
was.” I asked if he ever photographed people who didn’t look
so great, the sidewalk’s blooper reel.
He seemed almost offended. “I’m not drawn to something
awful,” he said. “I wouldn’t even see that. I’m looking for
something that has beauty. Do’s and don’ts? I don’t think
there are any don’ts! What right does one have? It’s like the
Queen of England, when she appears, and people have nasty
things to say. My God, she’s dressing for her station and her
office!” A burly man dressed in a flannel shirt and steel-toed
boots approached. “Hi! I’d like to shake the hand of the kid!”
he said, boomingly, offering his palm to Cunningham, who
smiled. The two men began shadowboxing.
“Congrats, Billy. Can’t believe they even got a bicycle in the
window!”The man headed off down the sidewalk, and, as
he faded from view, I asked who he was. “You get to know
people,” Cunningham said, explaining that it was an undercover
cop.
Cunningham was born and brought up in Boston, the
second of four children in an Irish Catholic family. There
remains about him a distinct New Englishness. “One of our
colleagues says that his voice sounds like that of an elderly
hardware-store owner in Vermont,” Trip Gabriel said. At the
Times, Cunningham doesn’t use a computer; he recently got
a desk, and voice mail, which he has never checked. The paper
got rid of its film-processing lab a few years ago, when it went
digital, so Cunningham has his film developed at a one-hour
photo center, on Forty-third Street. Each week, he brings a
batch of his negatives to the office, where a member of the art
department helps him create a layout. “He has browbeaten
and exhausted and worn out the patience of generations of
assistants in that process,” Gabriel said, with affection.
“It was difficult around the turn of this century,” Cunningham
said, “because I had older art directors and they had other
ideas of how things should be laid out. No one could stand
me. Too much trouble! Five pictures, and that’s it. I said, ‘You
can’t do that. You’ve got to tell a story to the reader.’ I’m
writing with pictures—that’s what I always tell them. You go
and tell Maureen Dowd she can only use fifteen words, and
no changes. That’s ridiculous!” He continued, “Young kids,
32

CUNNINGHAM
All photographs taken by Bill Cunningham and provided by The New York Times.
33

CUNNINGHAM
Photograph courtesy of Esenta Tare.
aren’t they wonderful? Not because I push them around—I
would never do that—but because they’re more open to new
thought.” According to “Bill on Bill”—an autobiographical
article, published in the Times in 2002, that for those with
an interest in Cunningham has taken on the authority of a
holy text —Cunningham got his start in fashion as a stockboy
at Bonwit Teller, where an executive, noticing his habit of
watching the lunchtime passersby (“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s
my hobby’ “), encouraged him to revamp their outfits in his
mind’s eye. In 1948, after a few months of classes at Harvard,
Cunningham arrived in New York, where he lived with an
aunt and uncle and worked at Bonwit’s, again, in advertising,
his uncle’s profession. “That’s why my family allowed me
to come here and encouraged me to go into the business,”
he wrote in “Bill on Bill.” “I think they were worried I was
becoming too interested in women’s dresses.”
Actually, hats. After a year, Cunningham rented a top-floor
room in a walkup on East Fifty-second Street. In exchange for
the apartment, he agreed to clean for the men who owned the
building. He worked at a drugstore, and at Howard Johnson,
as a counterman. (“Both jobs provided my meals,” he wrote,
“and the dimes and nickels of my tips paid for millinery
supplies.”) He sold his creations to a carriage-trade clientele
under the name William J. “My family would have been too
embarrassed,” he recalled. “They were very shy people.”
During the Korean War, Cunningham was drafted into the
Army; when he returned to New York he resumed the hat
trade from a shop on West Fifty-fourth Street. In 1963, John
Fairchild hired him as a writer at Women’s Wear Daily. (Eventually,
he went on to cover fashion for the Chicago Tribune
and for Details.) For a time in the late fifties, he owned a
hat shop on Jobs Lane, in Southampton. He is said to have
slept on a cot, hanging his wardrobe—khakis, a shirt, a pair
of underwear—over the closet door. In 1966, a photographer
Cunningham knew gave him an Olympus Pen D half-frame
camera. “It cost about thirty-five dollars,” Cunningham wrote.
“He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real
beginning.”
The best ensembles Cunningham ever saw were in the sixties.
“I was at a fashion show on Seventh Avenue one day, and I
heard commotion out on the street,” he said. “I said, ‘Huh,
what’s that?’ and got up and left the show and saw all these
flower children protesting the Vietnam War. I suddenly realized
that I had always liked the street. I should have known all
along.” Other scenes that have stuck with him: the “incredible
34

“
The problem is I'm not a
good photographer. To be
perfectly honest, I'm too
shy. ot aggressive enough.
Well, I'm not aggressive
at all. I just loved to
see wonderfully dressed
women, and I still do.”
CUNNINGHAM
−BILL CUNNINGHAM
things” from “those marvellous concerts in Tompkins Square
Park”; a woman, walking up things” from “those marvellous
concerts in Tompkins Square Park”; a woman, walking up
Madison Avenue, in a beige-and-black knitted suit from Sonia
Rykiel, accompanied by two beige-and-black pug dogs on
Venetian-red leashes with gold bells.
Cunningham stepped up to one of the Bergdorf windows and
peered at the exhibit inside. “Oh, this is a Doktor,” he said,
referring to a shot of Mrs. Doktor, the secretary, with the
hushed reverence accorded a Renoir or a van Gogh, as if she,
not he, were the artist. “One of the most fascinating. That’s a
wooden gold picture frame that she’s wearing as a necklace. I
got up close, and saw that it had been cut and it was on hinges,
so that it conformed to her body.” A few seconds earlier, a
young Japanese woman had pressed her nose to the glass.
“See, that’s a Margiela sweater,” Cunningham said, indicating
what appeared to be a few stray white yarns on the back of the
woman’s cardigan. “It’s his label. He just uses stitches.”
Haute couture, of which Cunningham has rabbinical knowledge,
is appealing to him insofar as it attracts the most fluent
speakers of fashion, which he, and his admirers, consider a sort
of social language. “He is able to show us who we are before
we’re able to see it,” Linda Fargo said, when we spoke last fall.
“No sooner does Bill call it a trend— observe it, organize it,
and publish it—than it’s a trend. The real news of the week
was the aggressive footwear. I’m kind of bubbling and aerating
it with our team, and boom!”— Cunningham’s column the
following Sunday featured a montage of mostly black high
heels and boots, studded and strapped like those of a stampede
of dominatrices. In October, a few years ago, Cunningham
noticed, on his daily rounds, that an unusual number of
women were carrying enormous—practically Hefty-size—tote
bags embellished with geometric patterns. “I thought, My
God, what’s going on?” he recalled. “You see, the story was
the handbags were becoming more elaborate and heavier and
heavier, and apparently Goyard, a hundred-year-old French
firm, was able to develop a canvas coated with lacquer that was
durable, lightweight, and could hold lots of stuff. There’s got
to be a reason when a lot of people buy things.”
Cunningham is as attuned to the bourgeois as he is to the
avant-garde, and the mundane accessories of day-to-day life
are as exalted in his photographs as any platform shoe or
deconstructed bustle. Balaclavas, shown in collage, hint at the
martial aspect of New York street life. An umbrella, flipped
inside out by the wind, becomes an abstract sculpture; a snow
35

CUNNINGHAM
Photograph courtesy of Perfect Channel.
36

CUNNINGHAM
Photograph courtesy of Anna McDonald, 2009
poncho, wrapped around its wearer’s head, is a plastic exoskeleton
that will eventually be shed. He is drawn to anything
natural: children, gardens, parks, animals. (His column has
featured a parrot, a duck, a python, a monkey, a tortoise, and
many dogs; not long ago, he took a train all the way back
to Long Island when he realized that some black irises he
had just seen at Old Westbury Gardens perfectly echoed the
filigreed lines of both a 1900 cut-velvet Worth gown and
some nearby wrought-iron gates.) He has a thing for curbside
puddles. “It’s a little ridiculous, but a fierce snowstorm is
wonderful!” he said. “Oh, it’s marvellous—it just rearranges
the whole fashion scene when the wind blows down from
the top of the Avenue. Six-, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and
they’re all in the slush—hey, it’s pretty peculiar!” He went on,
“Nothing like a good blizzard, kid, and you got pictures!”
Among the sort of people who know they are wearing noteworthy
outfits it is considered poor form—and, moreover,
bad luck—to acknowledge that Cunningham is taking one’s
picture, to blow his pose of invisibility. “If you see him,
proper etiquette is just be yourself, but keep moving forward,”
Linda Fargo said. For a civilian, though, opening the Sunday
paper and finding that the way she looked, on the way to a
dental appointment, or to the grocery store, was pleasing to
Cunningham can be a thrilling experience, like opening the
mailbox to find a love letter from a suitor she didn’t know
existed.
Cunningham nodded politely, but said little. As soon as he
could, he scampered off down the sidewalk to snap a picture
of a matron, on her husband’s elbow, in a yellow-and-black
checkerboard suit.
“The season is changing, but it’s more than change of season,”
he said, when he returned. “It’s how fashion will reflect the
financial changes. Fashion, the people wearing it, will do it
before they even know what they’re doing. You don’t know
yet, it’s just starting to gel, but there will be a style. You watch,
you’ll see something. There’s the old saw about hemlines.
Who knows? It’s only in the future you can know. You just
have to stay out on the street and get it. It’s all here.”
ARTICLE BY LAUREN COLLINS
37

a fashionable mind:
JONATHAN
BECKER
Jonathan Becker grew up in New York and lived in Paris
in the 1970s. A protégé of iconic photographer Brassaï
while in France, he began his career as a portraitist at
Interview magazine. As New York exhibitions of Becker's
work garnered critical acclaim and visibility, he expanded
his work as a documentarian in the 1980s with Slim
Aarons and Frank Zachary at Town & Country magazine.
Becker began contributing to Vanity Fair under
the tutelage of its founding design director Bea Feitler.
His portraits of filmmaker Louis Malle and of Becker's
mentor and friend Brassaï featured largely in the pages
of the prototype for the magazine's relaunch in 1982.
Becker's specialty in portraits, photographed by and large
on location, soon became a Vanity Fair staple: Robert
Mapplethorpe, Jack Kevorkian, Jocelyn Wildenstein and
Martha Graham, as well as countless socialites, artists
and heads of state. Assignments have dispatched Becker
far and wide — from the Amazon rain forest for first-encounter
photographs of members of the Yanomami tribe
to Buckingham Palace for the first photographs showing
the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles together.
Becker is also known for his close collaboration with
Bob Colacello, Alex Shoumatoff and other Vanity Fair
writers on stories about the denizens of worldly watering
holes, the Adirondacks and Aspen, Palm Beach and Palm
Springs, Capri and others. Over the course of three years'
work for The Rockefeller Foundation, Becker documented
its funded projects on five continents. Four books
of his work have been published: "Bright Young Things,"
"Studios by the Sea, Artists of Long Island's East End,"
"Bright Young Things: London" and "Jonathan Becker:
30 Years at Vanity Fair."
38
Lauren Davis at home, Park Avenue, 2005, Vogue.

39

BECKER
Nicole Kidman, Hollywood, 2000
Designer Tom Ford and agent Massimo Redaelli,
Cannes, for Vanity Fair, 2004
First lady of France Carla Bruni Sarkoz, for Vogue
Magazine at the at Elysee Palace on January 7,
2009 in Paris, France
The work of master photographer Jonathan Becker
is—quite simply—sublime, offering private glimpses inside
the remarkable lives of royalty, celebrities, artists, writers,
activists, and scores of fascinating people around the globe. In
capturing their pain, their ennui, their anguish, and their joy,
Becker humanizes his subjects, revealing the curiously ordinary
side of the extraordinary. Becker’s inclusive eye frames
cultural history. His portraits for Vanity Fair—a magazine
he has contributed to for more than three decades—tell the
40

BECKER
haunting, personal stories of loss, memory, and contemplation.
The expansive breadth of Becker’s photography chronicles a
world in transition, a view of society that is seldom seen. His
ability to seize the authenticity of a moment is reflected by
his life spent delivering unforgettable, lasting images. The
Savannah College of Art and Design is honored to share the
world of Becker in A Fashionable Mind: Photographs by Jonathan
Becker—the first museum retrospective of his work in
more than 30 years—at SCAD FASH, the Savannah College
of Art and Design’s museum celebrating fashion and film.
ARTICLE BY PAULA WALLACE
41

BECKER
Andy Warhol and his corsets at the fourth factory, New York, 1986.
Mapplethorpe at his Whitney Retrospective, 1988.
Madonna, Martha Graham, Calvin Klein at City Center, 1990.
42

BECKER
“
My goal is to always
make one good
picture, even it it's
one good picture a
year. It's a picture
of a rapport. There's
something there
a twinkle.”
−JONATHAN BECKER
43

leadership
“This museum focuses on
the past, present and future
of fashion design, connecting
conceptual to historical
principles of dress, whether
ceremonial, celebratory or
casual, and welcomes visitors
of all ages to engage with
cutting-edge exhibitions,
educationally enriching events,
films and forums, guided by
curricula for K-12 students
and resources for graduate
scholars.”
−SCAD President & Founder, Paula Wallace
Photos courtesy of SCAD FASH.
44

PAULA WALLACE
Paula Wallace is the president and
founder of the Savannah College of
Art and Design, a private, nonprofit,
accredited university for creative
careers. Established in 1978, SCAD
is the largest, most comprehensive art
and design university in the U.S. Since
her appointment as president in 2000,
Wallace has more than doubled the
university's enrollment from less than
5,000 students to more than 12,000
students hailing from more than 100
countries. Wallace has created several
signature SCAD events, including the
Savannah Film Festival, SCAD deFINE
ART, SCADstyle, Sidewalk Arts Festival
and SCAD aTVfest. Under her leadership,
SCAD was named one of the
2014 Red Dot Design Rankings top 10
universities in the Americas and Europe.
Further, the SCAD undergraduate interior
design program earned DesignIntelligence's
top ranking for four consecutive
years.
Wallace earned a Bachelor of Arts
degree from Furman University and
Master of Education and Education
Specialist degrees from Georgia State
University; she also was awarded an
honorary Doctor of Laws from Gonzaga
University. Wallace was appointed a
Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes
Academiques by the French Embassy
in the United States of America, and
the Georgia Historical Society named
her a 2015 Georgia Trustee. She serves
on the National Advisory Board of the
National Museum of Women in the Arts
in Washington, D.C.
ALEXANDRA SACHS
Alexandra Sachs is the executive director
of SCAD FASH and the university's
Atlanta galleries and exhibitions. Prior
to joining SCAD, she directed Solomon
Projects, a gallery of contemporary art
in Atlanta, for a decade. Additionally,
Sachs has worked for the Baltimore
Museum of Art and the British Council
at the Venice Biennale. She serves as the
vice president for board of directors of
Art Papers and is an active volunteer for
arts and civic organizations in Atlanta.
RAFAEL GOMES
Rafael Gomes is a fashion exhibitions
consultant for the Savannah College of
Art and Design. Before joining SCAD,
he was an archivist and exhibition coordinator
at Vivienne Westwood, where he
oversaw the coordination and styling of
global fashion shoots, videos and fashion
shows. Gomes also designed, planned
and executed large-scale exhibitions at
numerous world-renowned museums
and galleries, including the Victoria and
Albert Museum, the Palace of Versailles,
the New York Metropolitan Museum of
Art, and the SCAD Museum of Art.
45

GROUP VISITS
SCAD FASH welcomes groups by appointment, extending its exhibition and
educational resources through guided tours and access to scheduled film screenings,
lectures and gallery talks.
Group visits are available at reduced rates for a minimum of 10 people.
Reservations should be secured by phone or email at least two weeks in advance.
For more information or to make a reservation, email at scadfash@scad.edu or call
404.253.3132.
The benefits of group reservations include:
• Discounted rates for parties of 10 visitors or more
• Expedited check-in
• A dedicated tour guide for your group, if desired
TOUR INFORMATION
Guided tours of the museum provide visitors with an introduction to museum collections
and special exhibitions on display. Group tours can be arranged in advance
by email at scadfash@scad.edu or by calling 404.253.3132.
VISITOR GUIDELINES
CHECKROOM
The museum requires visitors to check
umbrellas, backpacks and bags before
entering the galleries. The museum
reserves the right to refuse other items
and is not responsible for items held by
the checkroom.
MOBILITY ACCESS
All galleries and facilities are wheelchair
accessible. Wheelchair accessible and
handicapped-accessible parking is
available on the fourth level of the
adjacent SCAD Atlanta parking deck.
The museum has a wheelchair available
for guest use.
CAMERAS
Still photography or videography for
personal use is permitted in the museum
lobby and some exhibitions. No flash
or tripods allowed. No photographs
or videotapes may be reproduced,
distributed or sold without permission
from the museum.
SMOKING
Smoking is prohibited inside the
museum and the SCAD Atlanta facility.
CELLULAR PHONES
The use of cellular phones in the
museum galleries is not permitted.
FOOD AND DRINKS
Food and drinks are not permitted in
the museum.
SKETCHING
Sketching, in pencil only, is permitted in
galleries. Use of any medium other than
pencil must be approved and supervised.
While sketching, please do not block
gallery traffic flow.
STROLLERS
Strollers are permitted in the galleries,
but oversize strollers are prohibited.
46

visit scad fash
SCAD FASH
1600 Peachtree St. NW
Atlanta, GA 30309
404. 253. 3132
scadfash@scad.edu
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.
HOURS
Sunday: Noon to 5 p.m.
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Wednesday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Thursday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed Holidays: New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Jr.
Day, Easter, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and following
day, Christmas Day
ADMISSION
Tickets are available at the museum front desk or online
General Admission: $10
Discounted (senior/military): $8
Family (three or more): $20
College students with ID: $5
SCAD alumni: $5
Children under 14: $ FREE
SCAD student/faculty/staff: FREE
Any scheduled special exhibitions, films, lectures and gallery
talks are included in the price of admission.
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membership
SCAD FASH members receive exclusive benefits and privileges and also advance
the SCAD FASH mission, providing crucial support for community outreach, educational
programs, exhibitions and art conservation. In addition, the benefits of supporting
SCAD FASH are honored at the SCAD Museum of Art, providing access to
two world-class institutions with one membership. You may purchase memberships
online, by calling 912.525.7191 or in person at the museum admission desk.
SCAD FASH Museum, Oscar de la Renta Exhibition, 2015.
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.
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BENEFITS
» Free admission
» Invitations to members-only exhibition receptions
» Museum newsletter
» 10 percent discount on admission for member guests
» 10 percent museum shop discount
FRIEND: Up to $150
» All general membership benefits
» Unlimited free admission for two adults
» Two free guest passes annually
» Invitation to exclusive exhibition previews
» Private, curator-led museum tour for two adults
» Invitations to special events
DONOR: Up to $500
» All FRIEND level benefits
» Five free guest passes annually
» Choice of two copies of SCAD-published exhibition
catalog or book
PATRON: Up to $1,500
» All DONOR level benefits
» Invitation to private patron tours
» Ten free guest passes annually
» Reserved seating at special events and lectures such as
SCAD deFINE ART and SCADstyle
SUPPORTING PATRON: Up to $3,000
» All PATRON level benefits
» Two general admission tickets to the SCAD Fashion
Show or one aTVfest festival pass
» Advance purchasing for Savannah Film Festival passes
PRESIDENT’S CIRCLE: Up to $6,000
» All SUPPORTING PATRON level benefits
» Two Savannah Film Festival Gold passes or four
aTVfest platinum passes
» Private, curator-led museum tour for up to 10 adults
(upon request)
» Four VIP tickets to the SCAD Fashion Show or two
aTVfest festival passes
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credits
Publication design by Torey Thrash
Spring 2016
Typefaces used:
Janson Test LT Std (55 Roman, 56
Italic, 75 Bold, 75 Bold Italic)
Photos courtesy of:
scadfash.com
(unless otherwise noted)
Content courtesy of:
scadfash.com
(unless otherwise noted)
Photo courtesy of SCAD FASH.
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