Cynthia Rowley

Cynthia Rowley was seven when she constructed her first dress. As a senior at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she sold her first collection of eight pieces to a number of New York’s most prominent stores. Since then, the Cynthia Rowley Collection has grown beyond women’s wear to include beauty, baby, bicycles, active-wear, home sewing patterns, tools, handbags, shoes, legwear, and shapewear.

Rowley is a best-selling author of the Swell series and has five books to date; her most recent, Slim: A Fantasy Memoir, includes her original drawings. She is a mother of two daughters and is married to Bill Powers, co-owner of Half Gallery on the Lower East Side and judge on Bravo’s competition series Work of Art. Bill and Cynthia co-founded the art retail site Exhibition A with Laura Martin and Gabby Munoz, which offers limited-edition contemporary fine artworks to its members. Rowley has collaborated in creative ventures and capsule collections with artists Will Cotton, Nick Cave, Olaf Breuning, and Ryan McNamara, and is constantly pursuing groundbreaking artistic partnerships.

She has appeared on numerous television shows, including The Late Show with David Letterman, Oprah, Good Morning America, and Today. She regularly appears as a guest judge on Project Runway and Design Star. Rowley’s designs have been featured in nearly every major magazine domestically and internationally, including Vogue, Elle, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Marie Claire, Lucky, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Elle Décor, In Style, and Vogue Paris, among many others. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) honored her with the prestigious Perry Ellis Award for Womenswear and recognized her again with a nomination for New Menswear Design Talent. The Cynthia Rowley Collection is sold in better department, specialty, and online stores, as well as in approximately 60 Cynthia Rowley shops around the world.