When Dillard’s vice president of merchandising Alexandra Dillard Lucie went looking for a collaborator to design a capsule collection for the retailer’s largest ladies’ apparel brand, she didn’t go through an agency or a casting call. She went to Instagram, found a Mobile-based designer and style influencer named Elizabeth Damrich, and reached out cold. “I blindly reached out to Liz via Instagram nearly a year ago after being a great admirer of her style and home,” Lucie said at the collection’s debut. “I knew she would be an incredible fit.”
She was right. In August 2023, the Elizabeth Damrich x Antonio Melani collection launched online and in 247 Dillard’s stores across the country — the culmination of a career that has run from Athens, Alabama, to the creative agencies of New York, a design degree in Charleston, and finally home to a historic house in Mobile’s Oakleigh Garden District, where Damrich runs her studio, raises two children, and inspires a national audience of style followers.
Doomed from the beginning
Damrich was born in Athens, Alabama, and says it was a great place to grow up. The household was a creative one — her father, Carl Hunt, loves architecture and design; her mother, Lacey, always had beautiful clothes and an innate sense of style. She and her sister Catherine busied themselves in a home studio, listening to music, painting, and trying on their mother’s clothes. “This fostered a lot of creativity,” she says. A family trip to Italy and France in the fifth grade, with its exposure to different cultures and especially fashion, made a lasting impression. “I was doomed from the beginning to care about design.”
High school — no uniforms required — became her laboratory: her mother’s nineties long dresses, belts, and jewelry, mixed into looks of her own devising. “I developed a point of view at an early age,” she says. The point of view stuck. “I try to find a sense of elegance, comfort, and style that feels like being at home within yourself” — a phrase that would eventually make it, nearly word for word, into her Dillard’s collection statement.
Alabama to New York to Charleston
Damrich attended the University of Alabama, graduating in 2010 with a degree in marketing and global business and a minor in art history, gaining public relations experience through internships along the way. The sequence that followed reads like a preview of the coming decade of digital fashion marketing. A creative agency at the forefront of the social media revolution offered her an internship, then a full-time job in New York City, where she sat in creative meetings with executives from Harry Winston, Lancôme, Marie Claire, and the fashion retailer Shopbop — listening to what the biggest names in the business needed from content to sell their products, and formulating strategies to pitch it. “I love marketing strategy,” she has said. “This was a total dream.”
Life intervened in the best way two days before graduation, when she met Michael Damrich, a Mobile native. She had been planning to move to Milan to study product development; instead she took the New York internship, Michael picked her up at 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue, and the trip to Milan never happened. They married in 2013 — in Provence, fittingly — and weathered New York until “the brutal winter of 2014 got to me,” as Liz puts it. Charleston, South Carolina was the next chapter: a branding agency job, a return to school to study interior design, and, degree in hand, the launch of her own business, Elizabeth Damrich Studios, managing interior design and fashion clients while collaborating with brands on social media.
The studio and the following
The business has two speeds, and Damrich deliberately balances them. Interior design — new builds and renovations — takes time; brand collaborations happen quickly. On the design side, she works with high-profile clients. On the brand side, companies approach her to shoot and style images for campaigns across social media, drawing on her agency years. And underneath it all runs her own feed, @liz_damrich, where tens of thousands of followers follow a life styled around the way light comes in at dinner, breezy afternoons on the porch, and the things and products that are woven into a family’s days. “I love sharing beautiful moments of life,” she has said. Her following grew to more than 34,000 on Instagram, with clients arriving largely through social media — many of them female entrepreneurs building brands while raising families, a group she describes as endlessly inspiring.
Philosophically, it is all of a piece: after her years in New York, she says, she knows how she wants to live. “I like a slower pace of life. I need sunshine, trees, and a healthy work/life balance.” The gift of social media, in her framing, is connection — the ability to find like-minded people all over the world without leaving the porch. She credits her parents with instilling the two halves of her creative direction: fashion from Lacey, architecture and design from Carl. “Interior design takes time. Brand collaboration happens quickly, so it’s a nice balance,” she says. “It came naturally. I feel so grateful to be able to have a business that allows me to be myself and further develop my creativity.” The travel that once took her coast to coast slowed after COVID, but the reach did not: with clients nationwide and followers around the world, the studio functions wherever the light is good.
Home to Mobile
The move to Mobile in 2019 was decided by a bassinet. Damrich was eight months pregnant with the couple’s first child, the crib had arrived at their front door in Charleston, and the distance from both sets of grandparents suddenly felt untenable. A committed Zillow browser, she found a historic Greek Revival home in the Oakleigh Garden District, and she and Michael came to see it without telling their parents. “I loved the bones of this old home and the thought of children growing up in old homes. It’s in my DNA,” she says.
The transition — new city, new motherhood — was challenging, and then 2020 made it communal. “I started falling in love with the city during COVID as our neighborhood lifted each other up,” she has said. “It felt like a big hug during that time and a beautiful, safe haven.” Her parents later moved from Athens to Point Clear to be closer to the grandchildren, completing the homecoming.
The Dillard’s collection
Then came the call that changed the business’s trajectory. Dillard’s — still family-owned, still led by members of the founding family — was working to attract younger shoppers and had begun partnering with influencers whose aesthetics could translate into product. The pitch to Damrich: create your own brand of clothes, handbags, and shoes for Antonio Melani, the retailer’s largest ladies’ apparel brand. “We love your style and your point of view,” she recalls being told. For a designer who knew from her New York years how difficult and expensive an independent collection would be, it was, she says, a dream come true.
The Elizabeth Damrich x Antonio Melani collection debuted August 29, 2023, online and in 247 stores: coordinating blouses, pants, dresses, and coats in sizes 0 through 18, completed by five shoe styles and six handbags in select colors. The design brief was pure Damrich — sculptural, architectural shapes in sumptuous fabrics, grounded in timeless neutrals and expanding into tonal shades of mint, olive, and rosewater for a coastal point of view on fall. “My hope is these pieces will become endearing companions to your wardrobe and make you feel elevated while still being very much at home within yourself,” she said at launch. Dillard’s merchandising chief Alexandra Dillard Lucie praised every detail, “down to the trim work and hangtags.”
For the launch, Damrich leaned on Alabama collaborators — a campaign shot by Ashley Kickliter, launch invitations by Paper Eliza, and local staples Gimme Gimme and Nova Espresso along for the ride. The through-line of her whole career holds here, too: an Alabama native who learned the business in New York, built her eye in Charleston, and came home to Mobile to build something that carries her name into stores nationwide — without ever really leaving the porch.