Zowie Broach

Broach is known as the co-founder of avant-garde design studio and brand B O U D I CC A. In her role as programme lead, she encourages her students to transcend the conventions of the ‘graduate collection’, pushing them to question their own identity, values and aesthetic choices on a deeper level. The result is that fashion at the RCA today is no longer solely about clothes, but instead a far-reaching and holistic investigation of the meaning of creativity itself.

Broach brings a relevance to the curriculum and avoids it getting stuck in a ‘this is what we’ve always done’ mentality. As an educator, Broach embraces fluidity of gender and identity, the merging of the physical and the digital, and bringing together different fields within the RCA to create new futures and thought processes that go beyond the usual graduate collections or fashion practices.

Broach was part of the Globalise Resistance protests as the century began, supported by readings of Vandana Shiva, Noam Chomsky and Brian Holmes. BOUDICCA consulted for Cartier on a long-term project about craft futurism and whilst at RCA she co-led the Grand Challenge on what it means to be a future human, as well as co-P.I. on Neo Couture, a research project under the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design, a research collaboration between the Royal College of Art (RCA) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU). This research aims to explore how AI can be used in fashion and textile design and how these early concepts for digital material interactions could be informed by values critical to haute couture.

Broach continues to deliver talks internationally at educational conferences about connections between the dignity of digital identity, climate, quantum understanding and looks to be part of the next paradigm shifts in Fashion as a design practice.