Archive Tours: Overview
The Lake Family Collection presents an exclusive, curator-led experience dedicated to the work of Bonnie Cashin—a pioneering force in American sportswear whose innovations continue to shape modern fashion.
This private archive houses a deeply researched and meticulously preserved body of work, widely regarded among fashion insiders as one of the most significant single-designer collections in private hands.
Designed for collectors, designers, and cultural patrons, this experience offers rare intellectual and physical access to Cashin’s legacy.
Visit Bonnie Cashin’s “Secret Laboratory”
The Lake family’s ownership of the Bonnie Cashin Archive is rare not simply because of its significance and scale, but because of its totality. It is shaped by inheritance, not collection or purchase.
Most major fashion archives are dispersed. Garments are accessioned by museums; sketches and correspondence are absorbed into research libraries; personal effects vanish into private markets; furniture and artworks are separated from the creative record. What survives is often selective, curated through the lens of institutional priorities or market value. The result, however invaluable, is fragmentary.
By contrast, the Lake’s archive remains remarkably intact and holistic. It encompasses not only finished designs, prototypes, and ephemera from Cashin’s groundbreaking career, but also the furnishings, artworks, tools, textiles, fine art, and domestic objects that shaped her aesthetic vocabulary. It preserves the continuum between life and work—between studio and home—revealing that for Cashin there was no meaningful separation between design practice and lived experience.
This integrity is extraordinarily uncommon in fashion history. Designers of Cashin’s stature—whose innovations in American sportswear, modular dressing, and hardware transformed twentieth-century fashion—are typically represented through isolated masterpieces. Here, however, one encounters the full material culture of a modernist life: the objects she collected, the spaces she inhabited, the systems she devised, the rituals she cultivated. It is an archive of process as much as product.
Equally rare is its custodial model. Rather than entering an institutional repository, this archive endures within a private family setting, where scholarship, stewardship, and daily life intersect. It is housed and selectively shared, just as Cashin lived and worked. Without commercial spaces or an office setting, Cashin created within her own “secret laboratories,” the terms she gave to the residential spaces used for all aspects of life and work, sometimes open to special guests and to the press.
The Lake collection is neither static nor commodified; it is lived with, studied, and carefully preserved as an integrated cultural inheritance. That intimacy allows for a depth of interpretation unavailable in any institutional setting, as Cashin herself wished.
The Experience
Duration: 2.0-4.0 hours
Guests: Limited to 2–6 participants
Format: Private, appointment-only
Each visit is guided by Dr. Stephanie Lake, Bonnie Cashin’s sole heir and author of Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It (Rizzoli). Tours unfold as an immersive tour, viewing objects collected by and art created by Cashin including all monograph content.
Objects on permanent display within a series of intimate spaces and dedicated archival rooms offer the exclusive opportunity to view the material culture of Cashin’s life and work, customized to the interests of each guest.
Lake Residence, Tour Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8F48Kj6HG0
Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It: https://www.rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847848058/
Access Levels
Collector Access
Full guided experience and curated archive viewing
Starting at $500 per guest (2 hours; each additional hour $150 per guest)
Tour Summary: house tour includes all Bonnie Cashin objects, art, and ephemera on view. Viewing of Archive rooms (no white glove handling)
Curatorial Access
Full guided experience, curated archive viewing
Guest selection of individual archival object viewing with white glove handling (five objects per tour)
Starting at $1,200 per guest (3 hours; each additional hour $150 per guest, each additional request for single object viewing and white glove handling upon request).
Tour summary: house tour includes all Bonnie Cashin objects, art, and ephemera on view. Viewing of Archive rooms, selection of white-glove handling (5 objects) and extended discussion
Patron Access
Full guided experience, curated archive viewing
Guest selection of individual archival object viewing with white glove handling (10 objects per tour), film Audio screening, post-visit archival dossier
Starting at $3,500 per guest. (up to 4 hours, each additional hour $150 per guest, each additional request for single object viewing and white glove handling upon request)
Tour summary: house tour includes all Bonnie Cashin objects, art, and ephemera on view. Viewing of Archive rooms, selection of white-glove handling (10 objects), extended discussion, screening of Cashin film and audio interviews, electronic copy of Bonnie Cashin: Chic is Where You Find It, post-visit archival dossier.
By Request and Invitation Only
Due to the nature of the collection and preservation standards, access is strictly limited.
To inquire or request consideration, private referrals are preferred.
A Singular Cultural Opportunity
As one of the world's greatest single-designer archives in private hands, Lake Family Collection offers an experience defined by rarity, scholarship, and intimacy.
Please contact us for request and review.
