Abrima Erwiah
Director of the Joseph and Gail Gromek Institute for Fashion Business, Parsons School of Design; Part-Time Lecturer, Parsons School of Design
Abrima Erwiah is the inaugural director of the Joseph and Gail Gromek Institute for Fashion Business at Parsons School of Design. She is a part-time lecturer and recently served as interim director of the Parsons Executive Education department. Erwiah, who joined The New School in 2019, teaches AI, the Metaverse, and the Future of Fashion, MFA and BFA Systems Design and Society thesis courses, and courses in MPS Retail Design and Entrepreneurship in the Strategic Design Management program and guest-lectures in the Executive Education program.
She has also guest-lectured at universities and colleges including the Savannah College of Art and Design, New York University (NYU), Rhode Island School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, Cooper Hewitt, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and the University of Ghana and at institutions including the United Nations and One Young World. Erwiah developed a master’s degree program at NYU Gallatin, where she studied the economic impact of luxury goods in Africa. She holds a BS in Finance and International Business from NYU Stern School of Business.
Erwiah is also a luxury goods and fashion industry executive with extensive experience in sustainable development. She is the founder, along with actor Rosario Dawson, of Studio One Eighty Nine, an artisanal fashion lifestyle brand and social enterprise that is a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund recipient and a CFDA + Lexus* Sustainable Fashion Initiative winner. She has worked for brands including Bottega Veneta, Cesare Paciotti, and Hermès/John Lobb; served as an advisor to the United Nations International Trade Center; and acted as a mentor to the Kering Foundation. Erwiah has collaborated with brands including Nike, J.Crew, Aqua/Bloomingdale’s, Foot Locker, Warby Parker, Edun/LVMH, Bergdorf Goodman/Neiman Marcus, and Yahoo. Her design work is featured in the “African Fashion” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and on tour with the Victoria and Albert Museum. It has also been featured in the “Sustainable Thinking” exhibition at the Salvatore Ferragamo Museum in Florence and at the Musée des Art Decoratifs in Paris.
Erwiah believes that fashion can be an agent of social change. She is the founder of Fashion Our Future, an organization developed with designers including Virgil Abloh (creator of Off-White) and Tanya Taylor that uses the power of fashion to engage underrepresented communities in the political process. She serves as an advisor to companies and organizations including Gucci Changemaker, NEST, the H&M Global Change Award, CFDA Inclusive by Design, Slow Factory, Conscious Fashion, and the School of Fashion at Parsons. She is a published author and has received numerous awards, including the prestigious FIT Changemaker Award; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Emerging Designer Award; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the University of Pennsylvania.
