Dialogues on Dress: Brennan Lowery

Dialogues on Dress: Brennan Lowery

Clothes break down. It is a well-established fashion fact, one we all experience on at least a micro scale - a snag in your shirt growing larger with wear, closet moths, fading jeans across washes. But for most of us, a wedding dress or precious archival piece may be the only instance in our own wardrobe where we consciously consider preservation. For any fashion designer, set wardrobe, or museum, this reality is top of mind, and on a mass scale no less. Preservation, documentation, and storage are vital to any fashion endeavor where volume continues to grow, but pieces never diminish in importance. The often unsung, always vital stewards of fashion’s finest pieces are in the business of technology, hospitality, and art all at once. CSA Business Associate Member Uovo Fashion’s Bushwick facility is 150,000 square feet, houses brands from Vera Wang to Oscar de la Renta and client wardrobes from Olivia Palermo to Sarah Jessica Parker and is full of a diverse team from tech developers to conservators. Among them is Brennan Lowery, General Manager of Uovo Fashion. With over 20 years of experience in merchandising and business, Brennan navigates the dynamism of Uovo and its infinite moving parts with a palpable sense of poise, decisiveness, and humility. “Serving the client, hospitality, that is the core of our business,” she says. Brennan herself is perhaps even more dynamic than the company she helms, appearing in awe of the historically significant pieces in their possession, aware of the responsibility that comes with their care, and hyper-capable of managing a grand and continually growing business like Uovo with sangfroid and vision.

Read our conversation below. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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Please paint a brief sketch of your background, personal & professional. Does a particular memory stand out as foundational to the work you do today, or how did you decide to pursue your current path?

I have been in the industry for over 20 years, graduated with a degree in Merchandising and Business, and came to New York as quickly as I could! I spent about 11 years with Kate Spade, working in retail operations for the US and internationally, and about 5 years working in East Africa: half of that was for a handbag business based in Rwanda, a partner of Kate Spade, and the other half for a jewelry business in Uganda. [You can read about Kate Spade’s On Purpose program here.] Afterwards, I worked for Bergdorf Goodman and supported client operations there. I joined Uovo in 2022, shortly after they acquired Garde Robe. It felt like a very organic transition for me; I had a lot of experience on the brand side, and also this curiosity about the fashion business Uovo was building. After all those years working with brands and clients, I was well aware that there are so many beautiful pieces out there in the world needing a home. In every role I’ve been in, there’s a building component, a fact-finding element. For example, exporting handbags from another country and figuring out customs and the like [working in Rwanda] required a lot of piecing together new information. All those experiences hone your problem-solving skills. Coming to Uovo shortly after acquiring another business, I had to learn quickly and do it all in the spirit of improving client experiences.

~When you see something at an awards show Sunday night, and then a few days later it arrives in your facility, that is a pretty remarkable thing. Just to see those pieces up close, the immense detail, the craft, it is a privilege.~

What drew you to working at Uovo Fashion, and how has the company evolved in your tenure? (And for the lay person, what exactly is Uovo)? 

Hospitality is at our core, and we do a lot with technology. We have a love of whatever it is we might be handling - art, fashion, wine [Uovo has branches for each of these] - combined with an attitude of service and utilization of technology to improve the client experience. Uovo is a super diverse and fascinating mix of people who genuinely love fashion & beautiful objects, and who are grateful to work with such gorgeous things. When you see something at an awards show Sunday night, and then a few days later it arrives in your facility, that is a pretty remarkable thing. Just to see those pieces up close, the immense detail, the craft, it is a privilege.

Uovo is a fine art, fashion, and wine storage and services business. We manage client collections - it could be a museum, institution, brand, designer, or private collection- and each client has a dedicated account manager. On the fashion side, every item that comes through our doors we catalogue, photograph, and populate into our proprietary digital platform called MyCloset. Something very unique to us is this app where you can see your entire closet and manage the inventory yourself through it. It allows for a lot of individualization per client. My team operates in three locations, New York, LA, and South Florida, but our clients are all over. Our art business has over 20 Uovo facilities across the country. Wine is our newest venture and services the New York area.

Describe a typical day of work (& perhaps some leisure) - or if no day looks the same, describe a good one!

I’m in the office here in Brooklyn, and my day is a huge mix - it could be working with marketing, sales, operations, time in our storage space with our photographers or with our developers working on our tech. I love the Brooklyn Museum (one of our partners), the botanic gardens, and Prospect Park, which are really right in my backyard.

What kind of clients and brands does Uovo work with?

There is truly a huge volume of items here. The list is overall private, but in terms of what I can share: Carolina Herrara and Vera Wang’s brand archives are stored with us, also brands such as Oscar de la Renta and Jason Wu. Sarah Jessica Parker’s wardrobe and the Sex and the City costumes are stored with us. And Just Like That season 3 just came out, and the fashion is its own character in the show. That is an active wardrobe, watching those pieces move in and out for a current show is a really dynamic process. We store for museums, and love our partnerships. Sometimes we can provide specific pieces or items for museums from our collections and get to work with them in that capacity.

~Sarah Jessica Parker’s wardrobe and the  Sex and the City costumes are stored with us.  And Just Like That  season 3 just came out, and the fashion is truly its own character in the show. That is an active wardrobe, watching those pieces move in and out for a current show is a really dynamic process.~

As Uovo works with preserving art and wine in addition to fashion, how do these different facets of the business overlap? And who comprises the Uovo Fashion team?

We operate as three distinct verticals, but there are joint teams; for example, we share a business development team between art and fashion. There can be a lot of overlap, as a client could have a large art and fashion collection. But handling these different items does require different skills.

Our operations team, collections managers, account managers, many of them have backgrounds in conservation and textile studies. Even those whose direct role is not necessarily handling physical pieces, they are incredibly skilled and knowledgeable about the garments themselves. There is a great level of confidence we can give our clients because of this. We see all kinds of garments and fabrics; last year we had a cape from 1901 that we worked on the preservation of. Everything breaks down over time, and our job is to slow that down.

Over the next five years, how do you see your work evolving? Tell me about a dream project, a vision, or general directional mood...

Two of our services are gaining interest, the first being luggage-free travel. We have clients who travel a lot, and instead of packing themselves, ask us to send things from our facility. We work with couriers internationally and have a domestic shuttle as well, so the client can get on their planes hands-free and we do the work of delivering their wardrobe, event items, whatever it may be. The other service is wardrobe digitization; this can be for clients who have their items with them, but want their inventory catalogued through us. I think the evolution of Uovo involves continued refinement and improvement of our technology. Uovo Fashion’s name has actually only been around for 18 months or so. Garde Robe had been around for 20 years. So, we still have a lot of people to reach, brand recognition to build, and connections to make. I really and truly believe in the work that we are doing, and the importance of preserving these iconic collections. I hope every designer will one day store with us. 

What does the future of fashion look like to you?

COVID did a number on everything. Coming out of that, I think there is some real and renewed excitement around designers and their movement between brands. I think we are headed for some truly amazing fashion years with these designers. I also think the question of what it looks like for us to participate in circularity is now top of mind, which is wonderful. I think the future of fashion is greater awareness and intentionality behind circularity. 

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Thank you so much to Brennan Lowery for having this conversation with me! Learn more about Uovo by watching their   brand video   and follow them here and here.

~Madison Brito Taylor

Images Courtesy of Brennan Lowery