In the rural community of Lancaster, Ohio, Gay Fad Studios’ name certainly stands out.
In 2022, husbands Dave and Jason Annecy re-opened Gay Fad, a historic glass studio, in the spirit of the company’s innovative founder, Fran Taylor.
Emblazoned above the front door on West Main Street – where rows of glassware shimmer beneath bright display lights – ‘Gay Fad’ represents a glassmaking legacy the couple are proud to carry forward.
In just three years, the Annecys have made the central Ohio city a midcentury glass and barware destination: designing and installing a downtown mural using original Gay Fad designs, reviving Gay Fad Studios as a business, opening a retail store and museum, drawing thousands to their inaugural four-day midcentury barware event and collaborating with internationally acclaimed burlesque performer and style icon Dita Von Teese on an exclusive set of whiskey glasses.
Most importantly, the couple hope to honor Taylor’s life, career and creative vision as a groundbreaking and prolific glassmaker who operated more than a decade ahead of her time, using the same methods and standards she established in 1945.
“We want to literally resurrect Gay Fad Studios as a way to preserve and celebrate its history because it’s so significant to our town’s heritage,” Jason said.
“But we don’t just want to do that,” he added. “We also want to keep going.”
Gay Fad Mural
After earning their masters degrees from Kent State University, the Annecys were looking to settle down and make a life in Ohio.
“We both grew up in small communities, so we started looking outside of Columbus,” Jason said. “We ended up finding a really great house in a town that we had never heard of, and we decided to jump in the car and drive out to Lancaster.”
The couple closed on the home within days.
In an effort to get to know their new city, Dave and Jason visited the nearby Ohio Glass Museum, which has preserved thousands of pieces of glass designed and produced across the region, mostly during the Great Depression.
Lancaster’s story as a glass city began in 1888, when crews discovered a supply of natural gas beneath the city that could be used to fuel the high temperature furnaces necessary for glass production.
Glass entrepreneurs flocked to the area.
In 1937, Lancaster-based Hocking Glass Company – which already employed thousands of people – merged with Anchor Cap and Closure to become Anchor Hocking, the largest producer of glassware anywhere in the world.
Across the region, some families boast several generations of glass workers.
At the museum, Dave and Jason spotted a set of drinking glasses that changed the course of their lives and careers.
“They were the only two decorated glasses in the whole museum,” Jason said. “Underneath them was a tiny sign that just said ‘Gay Fad Studios, Lancaster, Ohio.’”
The name itself sparked something in Dave and Jason. It stuck in their minds.
Over the next six years, the couple built community in Lancaster through a series of creative projects. When they were asked to design and install a new mural in a downtown alley popular for its graffitied brick walls, Jason – a seasoned product and graphic designer – remembered Gay Fad Studios.
“They want to cover the graffiti, but we can give people the same excuse to come here and just hang out and take pictures,” Jason said. “I wondered if maybe the patterns from the glassware could become this big mural.”
People loved it. Within weeks, the city chirped with excitement over the design.
“It became this thing that really brought people together and honored this part of the town’s history and culture in terms of glass,” Jason said. “For weeks and weeks the excitement just seemed to build. The whole town was buzzing.”
Who was Fran Taylor?
Jason scoured the internet, but found only scraps of information about Taylor and Gay Fad Studios. Eventually, he reached out to a local historian Joyce Harvey with questions about Taylor’s life and business.
When the two finally arranged to meet in person, Harvey handed Jason a thick binder.
“I just started reading and reading and I had goosebumps,” he said. “I just thought, ‘Oh, my god. This is something special.”
The oldest of five siblings, Fran Taylor attended art school in Detroit in the late 1930s.
In 1938 at the age of 24, she bought 144 tin wastepaper baskets for $30 and hand painted each with a series of flowers and other decorative detailing.
Taylor believed deeply in the practicality of art: that everyday household objects like wastepaper baskets and kitchen utensils could be both beautiful and useful.
Within months, she quadrupled production of her housewares due to overwhelming demand.
In 1945 – just five years after her initial $30 investment – Taylor designed and built a 46,000 square foot factory and moved her growing company’s headquarters from Detroit to Lancaster to be closer to her primary glass supplier.
According to reporting by Gracie Metz for Ohio Magazine, Taylor chose the name ‘Gay Fad’ to highlight the “joyous (gay) and the trendy (fad) using bright designs featuring nature motifs like florals, bees and landscapes to create products that stood out in a saturated market.”
She initially hired 25 women and provided free childcare on the ground floor of the factory. Upstairs, Gay Fad employees hand painted designs via an innovative rotating table that allowed them to switch quickly between glasses.
According to the American Ceramic Society, Taylor also worked with a team of engineers to develop special technology that permanently affixed painted designs to the glass, using “ceramic paint and pigment before placing them in an oven that heated the ceramic chips in the paint.”
The business took off.
More than a decade before most notable midcentury glassmakers like Fred Press and Georges Briard had even begun to make a name for themselves in the industry, Taylor was already running a company grossing millions in today’s dollars and managing a full team of national and international sales representatives alongside close friend and Gay Fad Studios creative director Bill Butcher – also a woman fighting for respect in the glass industry.
According to the stack of documents, Taylor had only one daughter, Stephanie. Just five weeks into the mural planning process, Jason reached out to her.
Stephanie told him she still had family in the area and was planning to visit. When they finally met, something about the project changed for Jason and Dave.
The family loved the idea of the mural.
“They all kept on turning to each other and they kept on saying, ‘Fran is finally getting the recognition that she earned,’” Jason said.
‘They took everything’
With help from prolific Indiana-based glass collector Dr. Donna McGrady, Jason compiled decades of information about Taylor and Gay Fad that otherwise may have been lost to time.
“[McGrady] was hunting for original advertisements and catalogues and promotional images,” Jason said. “She was trying to piece together Fran’s story.”
Eventually, the puzzle revealed a heart-wrenching truth:
During a 1962 tour of Gay Fad Studios, representatives from the Continental Can Company stole Taylor’s product designs for the 1963 season.
The thieves took dozens of pieces of unreleased glassware, filling boxes while Taylor was busy guiding the tour of her production facility.
Jason paused, audibly emotional: “They took everything.”
Even if Taylor and her team could come up with new designs, the company’s 1963 catalogues had already been printed. Taylor knew she couldn’t afford to reprint them, and Gay Fad never truly recovered from the loss.
Taylor took meeting after meeting in hopes of keeping the business afloat, but a company-wide strike followed by the loss of her primary glass supplier and a botched overseas contract proved too brutal to survive.
Trying to generate enough money to mount a legal case against her competitor, Taylor kept one employee on payroll and sold three of the four remaining commercial properties she owned.
“She sold her house,” Jason said. “She and her daughter moved into the second story warehouse of the last building she had left.”
In 1962, Gay Fad Studios closed its doors.
For nearly six decades, it appeared it would never reopen.
Reviving Gay Fad Studios
After months of work, the Annecys finally unveiled the finished mural in Center Alley, featuring giant, colorful versions of more than a dozen original Gay Fad designs.
Bright starbursts, clean lines and geometric mosaic-style designs pulled directly from Gay Fad’s design archives now cover the entire wall.
“It just felt very special to work on that project,” Jason said. “But it also felt like if we finished the mural, then it would just be over. I thought ‘If we stop, the whole thing stops.’”
A few weeks later, Jason slid his laptop toward Dave, revealing a freshly designed Gay Fad Studios logo: “What do you think about doing something with Gay Fad in the office space in the building the mural is on?”
The couple rented the long-vacant storefront and started renovating, planning to open a pop-up store. Quickly, their vision grew into something far more permanent: a brick-and-mortar revival of Gay Fad Studios, selling high quality glass and barware bearing Taylor’s original designs and new ones created in Gay Fad’s unique style and spirit.
On July 22, 2022 – after months of work behind the scenes – and with the blessing of Taylor’s daughter and extended family, the Annecys opened Gay Fad Studios’ doors for the first time since 1962.
“The whole store was jam-packed with people. It was shoulder to shoulder,” Jason said. “It felt magical. From that moment on, the whole community just wrapped their arms around us.”
Bottoms Up!
As “the driving force behind the logistics and operations of Gay Fad,” Dave quit his job first. But for months, Jason still worked full-time, commuting roughly two hours to Columbus each day.
In October, the couple accompanied Director of Fairfield County Visitors’ Bureau Jonett Haberfield to the Palm Springs Modernism Show, a week-long international convention showcasing vintage contemporary furniture, home decor, appliances, architectural material and more.
“We realized there really is nobody else doing this,” Jason said. “There’s no convention show for us to go to because there is no midcentury glass show anywhere.”
So the Annecys partnered with Fairfield County and the city of Lancaster to create one.
The couple debuted Bottoms Up! A Midcentury Barware Show in June 2024.
The convention drew more than 16,000 to downtown Lancaster, creating an immersive midcentury modern themed destination that spanned 35 businesses and including more than 60 activities, including expert presentations, mixologist classes, cocktail parties and a barware vendor and antique car show.
After such overwhelming success, Jason considered quitting his full-time job – with one caveat.
“If I quit, I want Dita Von Teese as a client,” he said. “When I think of any possible person that would be the ideal collaboration, it’s her.”
Nicknamed the international “Queen of Burlesque,” Von Teese is credited with reviving and preserving the American art form.
“By the 1990s, a lot of that history and information about burlesque was being lost, and Dita wanted to preserve that art form,” Jason said. “She understands us trying to preserve Fran’s story and our glass history.”
Eventually, Jason found himself on the opposite end of the Las Vegas-based performer’s personal email account.
Von Teese immediately agreed to collaborate with Gay Fad Studios on a set of cocktail glasses based on the four acts of her burlesque show.
The couple launched the exclusive collection during the 2025 Bottoms Up convention, which drew 17,500 attendees in its second year.
‘An amazing comet’
On an otherwise ordinary afternoon, one year after she closed Gay Fad Studios’ doors, Fran Taylor left a business meeting alone.
Within minutes, her vehicle collided with another car.
The accident left Taylor with a traumatic brain injury that affected her memory and ability to work for the rest of her life.
In longterm medical care, she could never conceive of a Lancaster without Gay Fad.
“She believed that Gay Fad never closed,” Jason said. “She was always trying to leave as a way to get back to her business.”
When Dave and Jason talk about Taylor’s final years, their voices soften.
“It’s funny, because the way that I see her is as this amazing comet shooting through the sky,” Jason said. “She was a total pioneer, a complete trailblazer and decades ahead of her time.”
“The pace of her achievements was just incredible, and her legacy is based upon what she achieved,” he said. “It is not based on that moment in time or what happened to her.”
Gay Fad’s new future
The Annecys are set to carry Taylor’s legacy of innovation, creativity and progress into a new era.
“It seems much bigger than us,” Jason said. “It always does.”
“We kind of feel like caretakers of Gay Fad – that we’re going to do as much as we can in our lifetimes,” he said. “Our hope is that there will be a future generation to pick up the torch.”
Today, the couple design and produce Gay Fad glass entirely in Ohio, releasing several new collections per year.
A large print book featuring photographs of original Gay Fad designs is in the works, along with several volumes preserving Taylor’s story, including catalogues, archival images and collectors’ guides. Barware fans can also expect further collaborations with Von Teese.
Eventually, the couple also hope to take Taylor’s story to the big screen, along with their most ambitious idea yet:
“We want to buy the original Gay Fad building back,” Dave said. “We want to put a full-scale museum and production back in that building.”
“We understand, in our own time and era, what it feels like to make space for yourself in a place where not everybody welcomes you,” the couple said – Dave finishing Jason’s sentence.
“This is so much more than a business for us. It’s about a greater sense of connectivity and community and perseverance,” Jason added. “It’s about being bold and dreaming big and really going after something – and focusing on what you can in your own time and what you can do to honor those who came before you.” 🔥
ignite action
- To learn more about Gay Fad Studios, click here.
- To shop Gay Fad Studios’ glass, click here.
- If you are a young LGBTQ+ person in crisis, please contact the Trevor Project: 866-4-U-Trevor.
- If you are an transgender adult in crisis, please contact the National Trans Lifeline: 877-565-8860
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