Memory Lane - Fashion Designers in Colour Part 3

This is the third and concluding part of our look back at the early fashion designers of colour.

Elizabeth Keckley achieved prominence and notoriety as modiste to Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of US President, Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s. 

Francis Criss designed clothes for Hollywood star and fashion icon Gloria Swanson. While Ann Lowe is most famous for the wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier when she married future US President, John F Kennedy.

Zelda Wynn Valdes was the first African-American to open her own shop in Broadway in New York in 1948. She was known for her sexy hip-hugging styles and numbered among her clientele many of the notable black women of that era including Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald and Gladys Knight.

Dorothy Dandridge in a trademark Zelda Wynn dress

Wynn started out by cutting her patterns out of newsprint, studying her grandmother’s seamstress and working in her uncle’s tailoring shop.

Her work even caught the eye of Hugh Hefner and she went on to design the original costumes for the Playboy bunnies.

Joyce Bryant

She also helped found the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, an organisation of black designers.

Valdes continued working until her retirement in 2000. She passed away the following year.

Now for a slight twist on the history of the fashion designers in colour, we’ll look at Paco Rabanne, the first fashion designer to use black models in a catwalk show. As a result, he was almost thrown out of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne, the governing body of Parisienne fashion.

Paco Rabanne fasion show and Donyale Luna wearing Paco Rabanne

The Spain-born designer made a name for himself in the 1960s with his space-age inspired fashions.

Memory Lane – The First Black Supermodel

When you think of the first black supermodel, what names spring to mind? Iman? Naomi? Tyra? We need to go much further back, to the 1960’s in fact, and to a wonderfully eccentric woman called Donyale Luna.

Donyale Luna, as she called herself – her real name was Peggy Ann Freeman, was discovered leaving a TV rehearsal and invited to New York by a fashion photographer. Against her mother’s advice she went to NY and eventually got an appointment  with Harper's Bazaar. The editors were so impressed when she walked into the office that they put a sketch of her on the January 1965 cover.


Donyale on the cover of Harper's Bazaar 1965

In 1966, editor Beatrix Miller had David Bailey shoot her for British Vogue, making her the first African American model to appear on the cover. The cover shot had her hiding her whole face with her hand, except for her boldly outlined eye, apparently chosen so as to not offend the magazine’s regular readership.


On the cover of British Vogue





















She had a brief but illustrious career and was featured on the pages of Paris Match, Harper's Bazaar and American, French and British Vogue, unheard of for a black girl at that time. She also had groundbreaking acting roles in the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, Fellini’s Satyricon and Andy Warhol’s Camp.

When asked if her acting roles could open more doors for black actresses, she infamously said: ‘If it brings about more jobs for Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, groovy. It could be good, it could be bad. I couldn't care less.’

In a 1968 New York times interview, she was allegedly very cagey was asked about her race. The interviewer later said she was ‘secretive, mysterious, contradictory, evasive, mercurial and insistent upon her multiracial lineage - exotic, chameleon strands of Indigenous-Mexican, Indonesian, Irish, and, last but least escapable, African.’

By the swinging sixties she was living it up in London and hanging out with the Rolling Stones. In an interview, she said of LSD: "I think it's great. I learned that I like to live, I like to make love, I really do love somebody, I love flowers, I love the sky, I like bright colors, I like animals. [LSD] also showed me unhappy things - that I was stubborn, selfish, unreasonable, mean, that I hurt other people."



With Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones






















In 1979, she died in an Italian clinic after an accidental drug overdose.