Elizabeth Lawson, a fashion student at SCAD Atlanta, is one of three SCAD recipients and the only person of color to win the highly coveted Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Design Scholar Award for Sustainability.
Her work stood out among hundreds of applicants, impressing a panel of esteemed judges, such as CFDA CEO Steven Kolb, designer Todd Snyder, Rag & Bone head of menswear Robert Geller, and Esquire Creative Director Nick Sullivan.
Lawson’s innovative approach to sustainable fashion earned her a $25,000 scholarship and honors. Her recognition in the fashion world reflects her brilliance and the exceptional education she’s received from SCAD’s School of Fashion.
Awarded by the CFDA, a nonprofit that supports American fashion designers through scholarships, funding, and events like New York Fashion Week. The organization promotes emerging talent and honors excellence in the industry.
Lawson said she feels “overwhelming and exhilarating.”
“It is all overwhelming and exhilarating in an exciting way. It feels like I am on my way into something I once dreamed of because I could not fathom that I would be here today,” she said.
As the only Black woman to win the scholarship in Georgia, Lawson said she’s “living in this reality” where she can’t fathom the words of how impactful it has been on her thoughts and inspiring career as a fashion designer and as a Black woman.
“It’s like coming from a space where we weren’t the top ones to be selected as such, like a luxury fashion space,” Lawson said. “There’s a lot of people that don’t take us seriously, and especially being a woman of color who’s also cultural and from West Africa, seeing those ideas like someone seeing who I am as a person, and want to flourish and continue to see those ideas flourish in the fashion industry, honestly, it’s an inexplicable feeling.”
When she first started out, Lawson said she didn’t begin to read fashion books or learn about the latest trends. She says that what inspires Lawson as a designer is growing up around her mom and the designers she knows.
“I was like, ‘these are cool people,’ but mostly when I started to get into this space, I was exposed to the resources and looked into the designers who have this type of taste, style, and sensitivity to the fashion industry.”
Lawson says fashion has always run in her family. She focuses on the technical side of fashion, like producing clothes. Originally from West Africa, Lawson said that’s where most clothes are produced.
In high school, Lawson was a sports girl, and that’s all she knew about going to college, but around senior year, she realized fashion was her calling. Being the class of 2020, a little before COVID-19 hit, she refocused her Instagram page to posting more fashion content and dressing up more at school.
“I was pulling away from sports senior year, dressing up at school more, and putting my first outfit together,” she said. “Seeing the different reactions and invoking feelings and emotions through how I dressed and expressed myself, I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Lawson did not head off to school at once. She went to a community college for two years and later left for SCAD Atlanta. SCAD was always her dream school, she said.
The experience at SCAD, she said, was “extremely great and helpful.”
“It honestly morphed the core of myself as an artist to see things differently, so my passion began to deepen increasingly,” she said.
She said SCAD was also a gracious awakening instead of a rude awakening. “It taught me my mind was so sheltered to one thing, and going to SCAD completely opened me up.”
With the scholarship, Lawson plans to help people. When she was interviewed by CFDA about the scholarship fund’s sustainability component, she recalled her recent trip in March back home to Africa and the Ivory Coast.
“I remember going to the farmer side, or the countryside, and seeing all of them working in really unhealthy conditions like trash everywhere and living in metal parts,” she said. “This was more than just clothes to me. This wasn’t about what you produce or how, any collection there is, but starting from behind the scheme of how clothes are produced.”
She even contacted the Better Cotton Initiative program to find sustainable ways to make an impact.
Her latest collection is CMYK, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. She says it is a collection of colorful celebrations for people of color. Starting CMYK in 2023, Lawson recalls learning about assorted color waves.
“I’m a big color person, and I loved how color is mostly emulated on Black people, and that’s how I was starting to learn it evokes different emotions, feelings, and looks on people of color,” she said. “I showcase buttons and shells as well, considered luxury trends back in West Africa.”
She said her biggest inspiration, besides her culture, is designer Robert Wun because of the way he mixes the “threads of his garments and mixing the flow into it,” which she is incorporating for her senior collection.
2025 will be a huge year for Lawson as she will be graduating from SCAD Atlanta, and she says the scholarship has been “a stepping stone” into her career.
“My goal for next year is to graduate and continue my New York internship,” she said. “As a designer, where you’re at, you have to leave and move forward, not stay in the same place because this will be the first time I’ll be on my own.”
She also said she wants to continue with the “sustainability” part of the scholarship she received and return home to ensure people are taken care of, trash is taken care of, and more.
Lawson says her goal is to leave a mark and impact on where she came from and to ensure that people like her are being helped and creatively affected.
“This is about me, my collection, and for me, it’s always been more than just clothes,” she said. “I fell in love with fashion as an idea to go through and express it, but there’s been so many pathways through fashion itself I feel can be implemented in my life and career.”
Lawson also says she wants to be teachable and leave a mark on the fashion industry. Five to ten years from now, she hopes to be a brand’s creative director and make an impact not just in the fashion community but also in the creative community.
To encourage people to follow their dreams, Lawson said to be confident in yourself, especially coming from someone who was very scared to pursue their dream.
“Please believe in yourself. I feel like everyone has a little speaker in the back of their mind that’ll tell them, ‘Hey, this is the path you should go on,’ and I feel like a lot of people are afraid to listen to that voice because they don’t know what’s on the other side,” she said. “When I took that next step, I didn’t know I would come this far in just two years.”
She also said to start putting your mind to your dreams because once she did that, Lawson realized the sky was the limit.
“For me, taking a liking to fashion coming from an African household, it was always ‘we want our daughters to be doctors, nurses, and careers that stick,’ but when you’re going into an artistic pathway, or even a creative pathway of any kind, you have to make a name for yourself,” she said.
For more information about Lawson’s collection, visit https://www.instagram.com/nadouenelle?igsh=dzZnNnJ2MHRnZDVp. For more information about the CFDA Scholarship fund, visit https://cfda.com/education/cfdascholarshipfund.
