On this week’s Curious Objects podcast, host Benjamin Miller speaks with Elena Kanagy-Loux, lacewear trendsetter and co-founder of the Brooklyn Lace Guild. The focus object is a seventeenth-century Italian handkerchief, but Ben’s and Elena’s conversation also touches on that time she worked for Courtney Love; good (and bad) representations of lace and lace production in cinema; and Refashioning the Renaissance, a five-year project to investigate popular dress trends and meanings in early modern Europe.
Elena Kanagy-Loux is a descendent of the Amish and grew up between the US and Japan. After earning her BFA in textile design from the Fashion Institute of Technology, she won a grant which funded a four-month trip to study lacemaking across Europe in 2015. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded Brooklyn Lace Guild and began teaching bobbin lace classes. She then completed an MA in costume studies at New York University in 2018, and worked as the collections specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for five years. In 2023, Kanagy-Loux began a PhD at Bard Graduate Center, focusing on the global history of colonial lace production.
