Peggy Noland

Peggy Noland is an American fashion designer based in Kansas City, Missouri and Los Angeles, California. She has been a teacher in the Fiber Department at the Kansas City Art Institute since 2008.

Biography

Noland is originally from Independence, Missouri. She is the daughter of artist Garry Noland. She majored in Religious Studies at Rockhurst University, then worked as a production manager for a New Delhi clothing company in 2006. On returning to Kansas City, at age 23, Noland opened a boutique in the Crossroads, Kansas City, called Peggy Noland Kansas City which has since closed as of 2018. Kansas City's The Pitch awarded her with their Design/Fashion MasterMind Award in 2006. In August 2009, Noland opened a second boutique for a month in Berlin, Germany with the help of the Kansas City Artists Coalition and a grant from the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program.

Clothing label The aesthetic of the Peggy Noland brand has been described as "white trash meets high class". Her designs have been worn by several musicians, including Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Lovefoxxx from Brazilian band CSS, as well as fashion blogs, like TeenVogue and StyleBubble. From 2015 to 2019, Noland owned a storefront in Echo Park that adorned such art installations as giant, green styrofoam hands and "cartoony body-building babe figures".

Noland's work frequently has been copied by fast-fashion retailers, a practice she has addressed through both activism and art. In 2016, she collaborated with artist Seth Bogart to create a temporary "Zara" installation inside their Wacky Wacko boutique in Los Angeles. The pop-up displayed actual knockoffs of their designs found online, repriced at inflated costs with proceeds donated to garment workers' rights organizations. Noland has noted the complex intellectual property questions her work raises, stating that her designs incorporating corporate logos create "rip-offs of rip-offs" when copied by the same companies whose imagery she references.