Christian Lacroix is Laird Borrelli-Persson’s fashion raison d’etre; the way he combined romance and historicism set her on the path she is following today. Borrelli-Persson studied literature at Boston College, spending her junior year abroad at Oxford, where she added some art history. After graduation she moved to New York to intern at Sotheby’s, and went back to school to get a Masters in Museum Studies and Fashion History at FIT where she wrote her thesis, “Dressing Up and Talking About It” on fashion writing in Vogue. Five years at the Museum at FIT followed and in 2000 she started working at Style.com and published her first book on fashion illustration. Since then she’s written books on fashion websites, cocktail dresses, and Marimekko, and edited Vogue: Fashion and Fantasy. As Vogue’s Senior Archive Editor, she’s always thinking about the connection between past and present, and contextualizing contemporary design with the history of fashion, Vogue, and art. She’s also avidly covered the Scandinavian scene for many years.