Fashion and textile historian Natalie Nudell has dedicated her career to highlighting the contributions of immigrants and women in the industry. She is awarded the 2026 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fashion & Culture for her writing, research, and database development that preserves the holistic history of fashion in the United States. 

Nudell says that her family’s experiences as multigenerational immigrants undoubtedly shaped her career as a researcher and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). 

“As the child of Middle Eastern and European immigrants in Montreal, I was lucky to have been raised in a multicultural environment that celebrated the diversity different immigrant communities bring to society,” says Nudell. “That exposure allows me to relate to more people even though they may not come from the same place or background as I do.”

A life-long fashion lover, Nudell’s initial fascination with clothing was sparked by her maternal-grandmother, an Iraqi refugee. Nudell’s grandmother worked as a seamstress and used fashion as a way to overcome the marginalization she encountered as an immigrant.

Nudell eventually enrolled at Concordia University in Montréal, earning a bachelor’s degree in history. Her honors thesis titled “Fashion Blogs: Do They Matter?” merged her interests across research, writing, history, and fashion. After graduating, Nudell moved to the United States in 2012 to begin her master’s degree in visual culture and costume studies at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

While in graduate school, Nudell was part of a group exhibition titled “Runway Moments: New York Fashion Week,” which included the Fashion Calendar. Due to her exemplary performance in the exhibition, Nudell was invited to write and produce the documentary film Calendar Girl about the life of Ruth Finley, an American fashion industry icon. 

Finley was the initial creator of the Fashion Calendar, a centralized scheduling tool for organizing fashion events in New York City between 1941 and 2014. This publication revitalized the landscape of New York fashion. While producing the film, Nudell formed a close bond with Finley, who later donated 30,000 pages of the Fashion Calendar to the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“Not only was I incredibly lucky to have a mentor like Finley, but I was also able to gain access to a previously uninvestigated archive, which helped focus my potential contributions to the field,” Nudell says. “Through this, I became the foremost expert on the Fashion Calendar.”

Nudell’s academic investigations led to the development of the Fashion Calendar Research Database (FCRD), a new open-source research tool that, among other functions, generates quantitative data related to the contributions of immigrants and other marginalized communities within the fashion and creative industries. As director of this project, Nudell has initiated the next phase of the project expansion, which includes “Archiving New York Fashion Week: FCRD x CFDA” a collaboration with the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) which launched in November 2025. 

She has also authored In American Fashion, a historical analysis of the history of the Fashion Calendar and its role in the development of the American fashion industry. The book challenges the idea that fashion leadership was historically predominantly male, and outlines the many ways women shaped the industry.

Awards and Accomplishments

Principal Investigator and Director of the Fashion Calendar Research Database (2024)
Principal Investigator (PI) “Archiving Fashion: Mapping Fashion and Textile Collections Conference,” FIT (2023)
The Steinhardt School North American Student Scholarship, NYU, New York, NY (2012-14)