By Caitlin Orsino '25

A large piece of butcher paper spans Rosemary Leger’s office, where she has organized the curriculum of her Fashion History course and built a hybrid chart-timeline to designate various historical periods and fashion eras, complete with multicolored sticky notes detailing related lesson plans and activities.

“I tried teaching fashion history from Egypt to the modern era, and that didn’t work for me or the students,” she says, noting that she learned the material in a linear way from her professors at Lasell, but understands that pedagogical updates are valuable in engaging today’s students.

The student-faculty connection at Lasell holds special meaning for Leger, a 2016 graduate from the University’s fashion communication and promotion program. She spent her post-graduate years working for Brides Magazine and Allure in New York and then earning her master’s degree in textile merchandising and design from the University of Rhode Island — where she recently earned her doctorate — before returning to her alma mater as an assistant professor of fashion and director of the Lasell Fashion Collection.

Leger’s dissertation focused on zero-waste practices within fashion consumer culture, an idea that stems from her experiences and observations while working in New York. She recognized the immense amount of waste coming from the industry that often goes unnoticed, and that “sustainability is an actual issue that fashion needs to address.”

Leger has found that, in comparison to her peers in academia, she had a much easier time acclimating herself to the campus climate thanks to her time spent at Lasell as a student.

“There is an existing privilege of knowledge and comfort that I think I need to succeed and feel confident as a professor,” she says, adding that, at Lasell, such an environment already existed for her. She considers herself lucky to be able to reference lessons imparted by her Fashion Collection predecessor, Jill Carey, while also implementing her own fresh ideas on campus.

“I inherited the Fashion Collection from someone who was here for several decades,” she says. “I was lucky to learn from her expertise and can now translate that into a more modern teaching of fashion history.”

Photo by Todd Dionne