In 2003, after studying fine arts at Vassar, Mary Ping joined a slew of downtown designers who were actively challenging the status quo of contemporary fashion. She has since been designing Slow and Steady Wins the Race, an unconventional label comprised of a series of perennial capsule collections that focus on a single theme or concept. Engaging the anthropological as well as aesthetic facets of fashion, Ping reconstructs familiar tropes and memes ranging from the white T-shirt to the wedding dress, distilling from them their essential meanings and building on them with her own interpretations. Her qualitative and critical assessment of materials and garments as symbols has made her work a compelling and ongoing critique of how consumers perceive and engage fashion as object and as idea.