Dame Barbara Mary Quant was a British fashion designer and fashion icon. She became an instrumental figure in the 1960s London-based Mod and youth fashion movements, and played a prominent role in London's Swinging Sixties culture. She was one of the designers who took credit for the miniskirt and hotpants. Ernestine Carter wrote: "It is given to a fortunate few to be born at the right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent fashion there are three: Chanel, Dior, and Mary Quant."
Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre was a Spanish fashion designer, and the founder of the Balenciaga clothing brand. He had a reputation as a couturier of uncompromising standards and was referred to as "the master of us all" by Christian Dior and as "the only couturier in the truest sense of the word" by Coco Chanel, who continued, "The others are simply fashion designers". On the day of his death, in 1972, Women's Wear Daily ran the headline "The King is Dead".
The Galeries Lafayette is an upmarket French department store chain, the biggest in Europe. Its flagship store is on Boulevard Haussmann in the 9th arrondissement of Paris but it now operates in a number of other locations in France and other countries. In 2019, Galeries Lafayette recorded earnings of over five billion euros. It is a part of the company Groupe Galeries Lafayette and has been a member of the International Association of department stores since 1960.
Balenciaga SA is a luxury fashion house founded in 1919 by the Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga in San Sebastian, Spain, and currently based in Paris. Balenciaga produces ready-to-wear footwear, handbags, and accessories, and licenses its name and branding to Coty for fragrances. It is currently owned by the French corporation Kering.
Willi Donnell Smith was an American fashion designer. At the time of his death, Smith was regarded as one of the most successful African-American designers in the fashion industry. His company, WilliWear Limited, launched in 1976 and by 1986 grossed over $25 million in sales. After Smith's death, his business partner, Laurie Mallet, continued the line with various designers creating collections. Without Smith, the company floundered and due to financial problems and poor sales, WilliWear Limited ceased production in 1990. WilliWear was the first clothing company to create womenswear and menswear under the same label. The accessibility and affordability of Smith's clothing helped to democratize fashion.
An It bag is a high-priced designer handbag that has become a popular best-seller. The phenomenon arose in the fashion industry and was named in the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of handbag brands that have been considered "It bags" are Chanel, Hermès and Fendi.
Behnaz Sarafpour is an Iranian-born American fashion designer, and fragrance designer. She had a ready-to-wear line of women's apparel bearing her name, Behnaz Sarafpour, Ltd. from 2001 until 2014, and has her own perfume line. Sarafpour has held design positions at Isaac Mizrahi, Narciso Rodriguez, Richard Tyler, Anne Klein, and Barneys New York. She has been based in New York City and Pound Ridge, New York.
Bonnie Cashin was an American fashion designer. Considered a pioneer in the design of American sportswear, she created innovative, uncomplicated clothing that catered to the modern, independent woman beginning in the post-war era through to her retirement from the fashion world in 1985.
Vera Huppe Maxwell was an American pioneering sportswear and fashion designer.
Rodarte is an American brand of clothing and accessories founded and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, USA, by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy.
Ralph Rucci is an American fashion designer and artist. He is known in particular for Chado Ralph Rucci, a luxury clothing and accessories line. Rucci's clothing designs have appeared in a number of major exhibitions, and he has won some significant fashion-industry awards. He is the subject of a recent documentary, and he and his clothing have received positive critical response in the fashion press.
Shiatzy Chen is a Taiwanese luxury fashion house founded in 1978 by Wang Chen Tsai-Hsia (王陳彩霞) and her husband Wang Yuan-Hong. Its style is described as "neo-Chinese chic", combining the aesthetics of Chinese clothing and handicraft with Western styles.
Prudence Millinery designs and makes couture hats for major designers all over the world.
Sportswear is an American fashion term originally used to describe separates, but which since the 1930s has come to be applied to day and evening fashions of varying degrees of formality that demonstrate a specific relaxed approach to their design, while remaining appropriate for a wide range of social occasions. The term is not necessarily synonymous with activewear, clothing designed specifically for participants in sporting pursuits. Although sports clothing was available from European haute couture houses and "sporty" garments were increasingly worn as everyday or informal wear, the early American sportswear designers were associated with ready-to-wear manufacturers. While most fashions in America in the early 20th century were directly copied from, or influenced heavily by Paris, American sportswear became a home-grown exception to this rule, and could be described as the American Look. Sportswear was designed to be easy to look after, with accessible fastenings that enabled a modern emancipated woman to dress herself without a maid's assistance.
Dorothy Wright Liebes was an American textile designer and weaver renowned for her innovative, custom-designed modern fabrics for architects and interior designers. She was known as "the mother of modern weaving".
threeASFOUR is a New York fashion house – led by Gabriel Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil – known for combining technical innovation and couture craftsmanship with an aesthetic focus on natural geometries. Hailing from Lebanon, USSR, and Israel, respectively, Asfour, Donhauser, and Gil have referred to threeASFOUR as a ‘United Nations of Fashion’, and their collections frequently promote intercultural unity. The house presents their designs at New York Fashion Week, and their work is exhibited by several museums internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2015, threeASFOUR was awarded the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for fashion design.
Yeohlee Teng is an American fashion designer originally from Malaysia and of Chinese heritage. She received the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for fashion design in 2004. Her work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Victoria & Albert, London.
A mushroom hat is a millinery style in which the brim of the hat tilts downwards, resembling the shape of a mushroom. It is a style that first emerged in the 1870s and 1880s, when it was usually made of straw. It became fashionable again from around 1907 to the late 1920s; these versions featured a distinctly downturned brim although the size and shape of the crown varied according to prevailing fashions.
Adolfo Faustino Sardiña, professionally known as Adolfo, was a Cuban-born American fashion designer who started out as a milliner in the 1950s. While chief designer for the wholesale milliners Emme, he won the Coty Award and the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award. In 1963 he set up his own salon in New York, firstly as a milliner, and then focusing on clothing. He retired from fashion design in 1993.
Suzie Zuzek (1920–2011) was an American artist and textile designer whose work was mainly seen in Lilly Pulitzer dresses, textiles and furnishings from the 1960s to the 1980s, and became exclusively associated with the brand until its closure in 1984. In the early 21st century, she was eventually acknowledged as the creator of some of the most widely recognized textiles of the 1960s and 1970s. A retrospective exhibition of her designs, curated in 2019 and shown in 2021 at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, both recognized the impact of her work, and brought her out of obscurity.
