Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Fashion Designer

Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a fashion label created by designer Mary Ping, based in New York. The mission of the label is to push and produce interesting and significant pieces from the simplest and most inexpensive fabrics and materials. Described as anti-consumerist, it is intended to offer designs that challenged the obsolescence of the output of the traditional fashion industry.

After graduating in 2000 with a degree in Art from Vassar College, Ping went onto work for Anna Sui and Robert Cary-Williams, founding her label in 2001 after further fashion study at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a conceptual clothing brand, presented as a quarterly clothing diary. Only 100 copies of each issue were printed and then distributed to magazines and selected stores. Each issue focuses on a different issue of clothing, such as ‘seams’, ‘bags’, and ‘prints’; and, as with each issue printed, only 100 pieces of each style are made, with pieces costing $100 or less. The limited run was increased to 3500 later. One of Slow and Steady Wins the Race's best-known lines is their re-interpretations of It Bags based on designer bags by Balenciaga, Gucci, and Dior among others. Made in calico and reduced to the bare essentials, custom-made designer fittings were replaced by equivalent metalwork from hardware stores.

The brand was featured in Hywel Davies' 2008 book, 100 New Fashion Designers, and in 2017, Slow and Steady Wins the Race received Cooper Hewitt's National Design Award for achievements in Fashion Design.

In 2017, Slow and Steady Wins the Race was featured in MoMA's fashion exhibit: Items: Is Fashion Modern? , which explored the present, past—and sometimes the future—of 111 items of clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries—and continue to hold currency today. This was MoMA's first fashion exhibit in 70 years.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a fashion label created by designer Mary Ping, based in New York. The mission of the label is to push and produce interesting and significant pieces from the simplest and most inexpensive fabrics and materials. Described as anti-consumerist, it is intended to offer designs that challenged the obsolescence of the output of the traditional fashion industry.

After graduating in 2000 with a degree in Art from Vassar College, Ping went onto work for Anna Sui and Robert Cary-Williams, founding her label in 2001 after further fashion study at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a conceptual clothing brand, presented as a quarterly clothing diary. Only 100 copies of each issue were printed and then distributed to magazines and selected stores. Each issue focuses on a different issue of clothing, such as ‘seams’, ‘bags’, and ‘prints’; and, as with each issue printed, only 100 pieces of each style are made, with pieces costing $100 or less. The limited run was increased to 3500 later. One of Slow and Steady Wins the Race's best-known lines is their re-interpretations of It Bags based on designer bags by Balenciaga, Gucci, and Dior among others. Made in calico and reduced to the bare essentials, custom-made designer fittings were replaced by equivalent metalwork from hardware stores.

The brand was featured in Hywel Davies' 2008 book, 100 New Fashion Designers, and in 2017, Slow and Steady Wins the Race received Cooper Hewitt's National Design Award for achievements in Fashion Design.

In 2017, Slow and Steady Wins the Race was featured in MoMA's fashion exhibit: Items: Is Fashion Modern? , which explored the present, past—and sometimes the future—of 111 items of clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries—and continue to hold currency today. This was MoMA's first fashion exhibit in 70 years.

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