The Battle of Versailles

After celebrating Thursday night at La Coupole, most of the victorious Americans returned to New York and plummeted back down to earth. Only a few of the models lingered in Paris. Anne Klein, thrilled by the success of the show and appreciative of the models’ hard work, offered to cover the cost of a few additional days in the French capital. (It was a largesse that left Halston complaining that Klein was trying to win the models’ loyalty.) “I stayed one or two other days,” Barbara Jackson remembers. “I took in the city, rode the Métro, and ate the food. I did all the things I hadn’t been able to do while we were working.”1

In the afterglow of Versailles, there had been rumblings about taking the show to Las Vegas or mounting another extravaganza the following year, as a kind of rematch of a competition that was never meant to be a competition. But everyone knew it was just talk.

Eleanor Lambert dutifully sent out press releases to her usual media contacts. And she repeated the American portion of the show in New York, in far more sedate terms—no Minnelli, no voguing, no big finale—for editors who had not made the trip to Paris. But mostly, the stories had been written. There would be no more.

The hullabaloo, such as it was, was relatively contained. In 1973, there was no social media to take the tale of Versailles viral. Charles Tracy, whom Stephen Burrows and Halston had invited to photograph the show, had mostly been unable to do so. Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, in a bid to heighten the exclusivity, had been ruthless in controlling both the press and the photography. And Liza Minnelli’s contract prohibited her performance from being filmed.

Wire photographers were there, however, and society ones, too. And the father of street style photography, Bill Cunningham, went to Versailles, where he stalked the backstage, dress rehearsals, and parties. He printed stacks of images and gave them to some of the models as keepsakes. Walter Cronkite even mentioned the show in a few sentences on the nightly news. And the home audience saw snippets of Josephine Baker performing in her glittering catsuit.

Mostly, though, the details of the event stayed within the insular world of fashion, where Americans savored their triumph. The designers saw themselves as scrappy underdogs who’d trounced the long-standing champions. They’d done themselves, their industry, and their country proud.

But with the success of the Americans at Versailles, fashion was nudged off its presumed path. The French designers continued their work in haute couture, but they also threw themselves into building their ready-to-wear businesses. There was no other way forward.

After Versailles, the French designers returned to their ateliers chastened but not broken—some substantively affected by the experience of showing alongside the American designers, others only subtly, if at all.

Versailles showed French designers how much excitement models could bring to clothes if they were permitted. Movement was an American signature, and it influenced the broader fashion landscape. Hubert de Givenchy was so inspired by what he’d seen on stage at the Théâtre Gabriel that he changed the look and feel of his own shows—changes that came with challenges.

“I went to California and I offered to some [black] models to come to Paris,” he says. “I [tried to] make a cabine with only black models, but some clients refused to wear the [ensembles] presented by these models. But I still continued.”2

He added popular music, turning the stilted, silent formality of couture into lively entertainment that, if not exactly au courant, was at least from this century. “It was important to allow [models] to move at their own rhythm,” Givenchy says. “So I chose the music of Cole Porter. It was a different and a modern presentation.”3

Over time, Paris has staunchly protected couture’s traditional crafts through unions, private industry, and the educational system. Couture remains a much-admired aspect of French fashion, but it no longer fuels it.

Paris now welcomes and encourages wild creativity from all sources. It markets its fashion as intelligent provocation, brilliant absurdity, daring theatrics, and whimsy. Instead of speaking to an Old World social elite, it whispers sweet nothings to the New World’s moneyed class. French designers haven’t sent any pumpkin floats down the runway in decades, but there have been steam trains, faux blizzards, naked women, live wolves, and prancing horses.

The industry has grown and changed, becoming more corporate. It’s now more a handbag and shoe business rather than one that generates its profits from expensive, pretty frocks. But even its corporate titans like to define themselves as having a special appreciation and patience for the artistic soul, in addition to a talent for moving the merchandise. Even Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury conglomerate, says, “The designer must be completely free.” He explains, “The creative process is, in a way, not very organized. An artist must be able to organize his day and sometimes you have a meeting organized and he does not show up because he has some other ideas. It is the same as in other areas, like music. They have another way of thinking.”

It sounds nice, but he qualifies his open-mindedness, saying, “In fashion, in creativity, what really matters also is commercial success. We are not there to have dresses in a museum. We are there to make dresses used by as many customers as we can.” 4

Paris also has become far more international than it was in 1973. Some of the country’s most venerable brands are in the hands of Italian, British, and even American designers now. When the founding designers sell their companies, retire, or pass away, it is rare that the French house will continue to be helmed by a French designer. Oscar de la Renta has designed haute couture for Balmain. Michael Kors led Céline. The historic house of Balenciaga hired the young American Alexander Wang as its creative director in 2012. And, most notably, Marc Jacobs transformed the storied Louis Vuitton into a dynamic, modern, influential, billion-dollar behemoth.

When Givenchy retired from the label that bears his name in 1995, it went through a period of disruption and reinvention that has become a rite of passage for once-revered French houses. The brand was acquired by LVMH and then cycled through British designers John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, and Welshman Julien Macdonald in the course of a decade. In 2005, the Italian designer Riccardo Tisci took up the reins. After a difficult start and several ready-to-wear collections that awkwardly wrestled with the restrained formality of the house, Tisci finally gave Givenchy a darkly romantic point of view that eventually won the affection of an array of Hollywood starlets—the “great beauties” of the modern era.

For the spring 2014 collection, Tisci found inspiration in Africa and Japan—a chaotic collision of cultures. His collection was dominated by draped jersey dresses in earthy hues, graphic prints, and a haughty ease. And in the models who wore sparkling face masks, created with painstakingly hand-applied crystals, one could recall the house’s deep couture roots, although put to flashier purposes.

Christian Dior is now another brand controlled by Arnault. He acquired the fashion house in 1984, eleven years after Versailles, when he purchased the bankrupt Boussac textile company of which Dior was a subsidiary. At the time, Bohan was still at the creative helm, but he was producing dull, unremarkable collections. His restraint had devolved into blandness.

To Arnault, Bohan’s dullness did not matter. He explains, “Dior is the most magic name in fashion in the world.”5 And he is not being the least bit hyperbolic.

Bohan stayed on until 1989, guiding the brand through fashion’s most obnoxiously narcissistic decade with discretion and dignity, if not much energy. He was followed by the Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, who was known for bold gestures—a dramatic collar, an oversized sleeve, an exaggerated cuff. After seven years, Ferré was out and, in 1996, Galliano was in. The British designer infused the house with his savvy shock factor, his historical romanticism, and his personal flamboyance. Galliano’s runway bows, complete with his own costuming—from a pirate to a body builder—were worthy of Broadway. But he was cast out in 2011 after he slurred anti-Semitic insults to patrons in a Paris bar, for which he was later tried in French court and fined.

A few months after that debacle, Arnault expressed shock and sadness over Galliano’s behavior. “I’m not trying to diminish the quality of the creativity of John,” Arnault says. “But to behave like this is a shame. What can I say? It’s really something that took us by surprise. It’s a shame.” 6

The modernist Belgian designer Raf Simons replaced Galliano at Dior. He has sought to redefine haute couture for a new generation of women. Respectful of the house’s signature silhouettes, its wasp-waisted New Look, its “Bar” jacket, he has streamlined it all, making the shapes easier to wear in a modern era.

For Yves Saint Laurent, Versailles only emphasized what the designer always knew: the energy of fashion lay in young people and popular culture. Saint Laurent was a fan of black models before Versailles, and his affection for them was only heightened afterward. “These women had a sense of movement and attitude,” says Saint Laurent’s former partner, Pierre Bergé. “He hated the word ‘elegance.’ He hated the word ‘chic.’ He believed in style and attitude.”7

By the time Saint Laurent died in 2008, he’d retired from haute couture and sold his company to Kering, or what was then called Gucci Group. Tom Ford stepped in as creative director, dividing his time between Saint Laurent and Gucci. After Ford’s departure, Italian designer Stefano Pilati took over at Saint Laurent. (Frenchman Hedi Slimane was tapped to take over in March 2012.)

Although it has been a decade since Bergé was actively involved with the brand, he continues to globe-trot, maintaining the Saint Laurent legacy through the Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent Foundation. He was vocal in his disdain for Ford’s work and was not keen on Pilati’s either.

But Bergé has been admiring of Slimane’s point of view. The fall 2013 collection, Slimane’s debut at Yves Saint Laurent, was an homage to California grunge. The spring 2014 offerings, unveiled in an upper chamber of the Grand Palais, included sequin-studded dresses, lip-print one-shoulder party dresses, and riffs on the tuxedo done up in leather. It was anti-elegant, anti-chic, and anti–good taste. But it overflowed with devil-may-care attitude.

Pierre Cardin, Versailles’s unapologetic futurist, continued expanding his ready-to-wear business. He became emblematic of fashion’s obsession with licensing, a process by which firms pay a fee to the designer for the right to use his name on a host of products.

In 1978, the Washington Post covered the unveiling of a Cardin airplane. “It is the penultimate designer label status item, a $2.3 million executive jet, and Pierre Cardin was at Page Terminal Saturday to see his design and to dot the ‘I’ on his signature near the door,” wrote Nina Hyde. “So the Cardin label is now on just about everything: fragrances and furniture, cars and bikes, chocolates and carpets, bathrooms and kitchens, clothes, of course, plus food, wine, and theater. Can there be anything else? Cardin can’t think of what it might be, but of course there will be something else.” 8

Cardin, a diminutive man with white hair, continues to control his fashion business, although it now has little bearing on trends, the retail climate, or the manner in which contemporary women dress. But he is supremely wealthy and his holdings include Maxim’s, which continues to host parties, as well as tour groups that come to see its art nouveau interior and Cardin’s stash of antiques, which is housed upstairs.

Cardin spent several years engaged in an aesthetic fight with the citizens of Venice, Italy, where he had proposed the Palais Lumière: a contemporary skyscraper that was more than eight hundred feet tall. Locals responded with unmitigated disgust. It was an ostentatious trophy building of apartments, offices, and a fashion school. Critics declared it a blight. The critics won. Cardin abandoned the project in 2013.

While Cardin resolutely looks forward, he carefully preserves his history at the Musée Pierre Cardin in Saint-Ouen, a drab, working-class town north of Paris. The museum, situated on the broad Boulevard Victor Hugo, is housed in a former auto garage, just across from the French equivalent of a Home Depot. Covered in blue ceramic tiles, the building is a bright spot on a street dominated by gray concrete.

With its soaring glass ceiling, the museum is a proud monument to Cardin’s lifetime of work. One can see the evolution of Cardin’s aesthetic, from the bourgeois chic of his time at Christian Dior, where he worked as a tailor creating the New Look, to his jumpsuits, Nehru-collared jackets, big shoulders, miniskirts, sculptural hats, and disco medallions. His furniture, thick with lacquer, is also on display—many of its artisans came from Saint-Ouen. The totality of his accomplishments points toward a future of jetpacks and flying cars—a future that has yet to be.

Emanuel Ungaro also moved aggressively toward fashion’s future, with ready-to-wear and menswear. The 1980s, when fashion was full of frilly ostentation, were especially in line with Ungaro’s romanticism. His long-time client Lynn Wyatt said, “Emanuel puts a woman on a pedestal, and that’s why I feel so feminine and romantic in any Ungaro gown.”9

His work appeared on the cover of Newsweek in April 1988 under the headline THE HEAT IS ON: FASHION GOES FEMININE—AND UNGARO LEADS THE WAY. The Somali-born model Iman wears a short, white, strapless party dress festooned with black polka dots and with a bouquet of red roses tucked into the décolletage.

Of all the French design houses, Emanuel Ungaro had the most troubled transition, after the founder sold the company to Salvatore Ferragamo Spa in 1996. At the time, the business was a success—a rarefied design house sitting atop a lucrative base of licensing, thanks in no small part to businessman Henry Berghauer’s early intervention. Following the sale, however, the house plunged into disarray as it was resold and designer after designer was hired, only to be fired or simply flee.

It finally hit its nadir on a Sunday afternoon in October 2009. The troubled actress Lindsay Lohan had been appointed artistic advisor to the brand by its desperate CEO, Mounir Moufarrige. She and chief designer Estrella Archs presented what could be argued was fashion’s most ill-conceived collection ever to be unveiled under the auspices of the great Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode. Relying on a retina-searing palette of shocking pink and safety orange, it included heart-shaped pasties.

The play for publicity, by any means necessary, registered like a death knell for the brand. The fashion press, so dispirited by the spectacle, could find no joy in the schadenfreude.

Several years later, in 2012, under the ownership of the Italian conglomerate Aeffe and with Fausto Puglisi as its creative director, Ungaro was still a mess—one that mortifies its namesake. In the fall of 2013, Puglisi presented a collection at the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie de Région Paris Île-de-France—a sober and dignified location for a brand that had become a near laughingstock within the industry. The show unfolded in a sequence of rooms with lofty ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and walls draped in tapestries. Massive French doors opened onto a manicured garden. Dominated by the pairings of teal, sea-foam green, and yellow with black, the collection made an argument for short, ruffled dresses, button-studded shorts, patch pockets, polka dots, and stripes. It was a long way from the sure-handed mix of prints for which the founder was so well known. There was none of his sophisticated, feminine sizzle. And there was nothing to indicate that at one time, Emanuel Ungaro had been rooted in the exacting standards of haute couture. It looked heartbreakingly cheap. But at least there were no pasties.

The success at Versailles brought the American designers newfound respect from the innermost circle of an insulated world. They had managed to overcome their own disorganization, petty grievances, and insecurities. And with a bit of luck that had the French overly confident and overdone, they had shown a small sliver of influential society that there was something unique and original about American style.

Although they didn’t know it at the time, the audience at Versailles had witnessed a turning point in the broader culture’s relationship to the fashion industry. In the hands of the French design establishment, fashion had always been an elevated form of creative expression for the social elite. For them, fashion emphasized rules, propriety, and order. The French designers doubled down on that philosophy with a spectacle befitting a royal court—not by accident, but by intent. And it was accompanied by all the stiffness, formality, discomfort, and remove of monarchical hierarchies.

The French performances were grand, but they were not contemporary. They celebrated history and tradition. They had nothing to do with the joyous spontaneity of now as was epitomized by the new conventions in dance, music, sexuality, and diversity. The French rhapsodized over the past. The Americans thrilled to the future.

The American designers’ success was predicated not so much on style as on worldview. The modest American ready-to-wear that appeared alongside the exquisitely made French haute couture was not an aesthetic triumph. Could one of Stephen Burrows’s barely-there little jersey dresses be such a thing? No. But it represented something fresh and compelling. It symbolized a generational shift, a new way of living, a new kind of commerce, and a new understanding of self-definition and control.

Versailles didn’t signal that America’s off-the-rack garments were better than the French, which were crafted by the petits mains who’d learned their techniques over generations. Instead, the American success was proof that ready-to-wear was good enough. American fashion, and the women who wore it, did not have to aspire to perfection in order to be dynamic and alluring. Clothes could be practical, accessible, and simple. They could be fun. A woman could be free. She could be an individual.

Eleanor Lambert, the great “empress of fashion,” as she was called, returned to New York and continued to work diligently on behalf of American designers. By 1993, Fashion Week had been reorganized by the CFDA as “7th on Sixth” and shows were centrally located in New York’s Bryant Park. No longer were editors perched on little golden chairs in the elegance of the Plaza Hotel. Instead, they sat on bleachers under a big top.

Lambert continued to represent a host of clients, including Bill Blass. She nurtured young publicists, such as James LaForce, who went on to launch their own companies and promote another generation of designers. And Lambert continued to invite editors to her regular Fashion Week brunch.

Lambert died in 2003, at the age of one hundred, at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was memorialized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today, the CFDA bestows a Founder’s Award in honor of Eleanor Lambert—a prize given to an individual who has made a unique and lasting impact on the industry. Winners have included photographers Irving Penn and Patrick Demarchelier, as well as retailers Joan Kaner, Rose Marie Bravo, Dawn Mello, and Kal Ruttenstein.

After their triumphs at Versailles, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass returned to New York freed from the insecurities built up over all those years of working in anonymity—copying Paris and being told that real fashion was born there and there alone. Anne Klein was relieved that she’d had the opportunity to present her work on a world stage and that it had been received with enthusiasm. Despite all the animosity, the arguing, and the frustration, she’d had a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But once she returned to New York, she had to face the difficult subject of her failing health. Halston had lived up to his own hype. He had not disappointed Norton Simon, his company’s new owners. His future looked boundless.

And Stephen Burrows’s world had expanded by an entire universe. Yves Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy were no longer just names in a fashion school textbook; he’d met them, had been praised by them, and had even bested them. He came home more confident and sophisticated.

Their so-called Versailles victory didn’t translate directly into new business opportunities for these five; but they were already on an upward trajectory. That’s how they managed invitations to Versailles in the first place. The success was existential for the participants, bringing them to the realization that their different approach to style was not only viable, it had the possibility of thriving in an evolving world.

At Versailles, the French demonstrated how to connect fashion to the breadth of their own centuries-old culture, with its social stratification, accepted doctrine, and rigidity. But the Americans proved that personal showmanship and attitude trumped tradition and formality. To some degree, American style vanquished French substance. The Americans understood the true future of fashion: it was commercial, mass entertainment.

With the exception of de la Renta’s, the businesses of the other Americans who shone so brightly at Versailles eventually faded. Today, they no longer are among the dynamic brands of the fashion industry. For Bill Blass and Anne Klein, the death of the founders was a blow from which the brands never fully recovered. Subsequent designers—long lists of them—couldn’t redefine the companies’ aesthetics in a changing world. Halston ultimately made terrible business decisions that began a domino effect leading to the collapse of his whole enterprise. And Stephen Burrows was never able to move beyond the peculiar circumstances of the era that invented him.

De la Renta’s business flourished after Versailles. With input from Eliza Reed Bolen, his stepdaughter from his second marriage, after the death of Françoise, and the financial savvy of his son-in-law, Alex Bolen, his company grew and expanded, with its current estimated global sales in the vicinity of $600 million.10 In 2012, he moved out of his original offices at 550 Seventh Avenue to expansive and airy new headquarters on West Forty-second Street, across from Bryant Park.

De la Renta remained as socially engaged as ever, whether through frequent dinners with well-connected friends and clients, charity balls, vacations in his beloved Dominican Republic, or via @oscarprgirl on Twitter, an account managed by his savvy communications director.

After a bout with cancer, he still stood tall, with broad shoulders and a sun-kissed complexion. He was terribly self-possessed, a splendid storyteller, a delicious gossip who would happily admit to his own bad behavior. He was attuned to the whims of modern style, able to satisfy his older, loyal customers as well as keep younger ones enthusiastic about the brand. He dressed, for example, Laura Bush as well as her daughter Jenna Bush Hager. Lally Weymouth, daughter of Katharine Graham, media mogul Oprah Winfrey, veteran journalist Barbara Walters, and stateswoman Hillary Clinton all wear his clothes. But so do young entertainers Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. Indeed, one of his dresses—a fuchsia cocktail dress with a billowing skirt—became a symbol of high-flying love and romance on an episode of Sex and the City when it was worn by star Sarah Jessica Parker during her character’s affair with “the Russian.”

There may be no other working designer who dressed such a diverse range of women, all while maintaining his signature high-society aesthetic. De la Renta’s fundamental philosophy was always simple: women, no matter their age, want to look pretty. And he dutifully obliged with clothes that spark no controversy. Even if he, himself, occasionally did.

While de la Renta know how to cultivate a broad clientele in a more relaxed, democratic twenty-first century, he came of age when fashion had rules and society had order. And at a certain level in the social hierarchy—at the level of First Lady, for example—those rules matter. In a 2009 conversation with Women’s Wear Daily, he expressed his disapproval of First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to wear a cardigan to a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. “You don’t,” he declared definitively, “go to Buckingham Palace in a sweater.”11

He was equally vocal and critical when she selected a dress by the British design house Alexander McQueen to host a state dinner for China. But unlike in the 1960s, when the American fashion unions bullied Jacqueline Kennedy into ending her love affair with French designers, de la Renta’s comments were fodder for morning television, but little more. Perhaps de la Renta was right aesthetically, historically, and temperamentally, but it didn’t matter. Michelle Obama wears what she wears, supporting American designers but refusing to be beholden to them or their arbitrary code of conduct.

De la Renta settled comfortably into the role of the sometimes grumpy, always charismatic éminence gris.

Bill Blass became a friend to First Ladies and a confidant to the first generation of independent dames. When he made a trip to Washington in 1981 for a charity fashion show benefitting the Phillips Collection, no less personages than President and First Lady Ronald and Nancy Reagan attended a cocktail reception in his honor before the $250-a-ticket gala. (They didn’t stay for the show, which ultimately raised $49,000.) Blass was solid, safe, fully vetted glamour.

Toward the end of his life, he sold his company for $50 million and retired to his home in Connecticut. After his death from throat cancer in 2002, Bill Blass Ltd. went through years of wrenching spasms as it tried to recapture the jaunty essence of its founder while also pushing the company forward for a new generation of women whose idea of café society is monopolizing a table at Starbucks while logged on to the free Wi-Fi.

The company, which once had sales of $500 million through its own products and more than forty different licenses, went through a half-dozen designers in search of the right alchemy. The midwesterner Steven Slowik, whom Blass had personally approved, barely lasted a year. Lars Nilsson, who had trained in Europe, was fired the day after he showed his fall 2003 collection.

Michael Vollbracht, who was both a friend and colleague to Blass, lasted the longest. He created quietly elegant but decidedly mature looks meant to woo back former customers. He even brought back models from the 1970s, such as Pat Cleveland and Karen Bjornson, to walk the runway. At first, they charmed his audience. Cleveland minced her way down the runway as she used to do in the 1970s, twirling and back-stepping and teasing the guests, who whooped at her antics.

Vollbracht won over many of the customers who had defected. But he couldn’t fight the prevailing winds of fashion that demanded charismatic designers, progressive aesthetics, celebrity endorsements, and hype. When Vollbracht repeated his retro model stunt the next season, the audience had lost patience. Most guests sat through the show rolling their eyes, willing Cleveland to just walk down the runway and get it over with.

In 2007, Vollbracht quit and returned to his previous life as an artist. The young New York–based designer Peter Som stepped on board the now sinking ship. Critics often compared Som’s signature collection to the work of a young Blass. It displayed an Upper East Side reserve, a playful sense of color, and a strong commitment to tailoring. But by the time Som arrived, the company was in dire circumstances. It was too late. By 2008, the Bill Blass collection was dead.12 Today, it’s little more than licensed products such as watches and luggage.

The days after Anne Klein returned to New York from Versailles were chaotic. In short order, she received the diagnosis that her cancer had returned. She knew she was dying and she began preparing her company for the future.

Businessman Tomio Taki had just bought a significant stake in the brand.13 Financially, it was on solid ground. Klein planned for her assistant Donna Karan to take the creative reigns, but Karan was unsure. She was recently married, pregnant, and she’d just seen her boss take a beating by colleagues at Versailles. She also didn’t yet know how sick Klein was; no one wanted to upset her, she was more than six months pregnant.

As Karan waffled, Klein worked to buttress the creative team. She interviewed Louis Dell’Olio, a friend of Karan’s since high school who had also attended Parsons with her. Dell’Olio and Karan had had conversations in the past about his working at Anne Klein—long before Klein’s diagnosis made every decision urgent.

“Anne Klein and Co. was the jewel in the crown of American fashion,” Dell’Olio recalls. “It was hot, hot, hot. They could do no wrong. It was really the place to be.”

Klein had built a company in which the designer was queen. No decision was formal until she’d signed off on it—including her own replacement. In December, Dell’Olio arrived for his interview. Klein’s appearance gave no indication that she was ill. “She was one of the strongest women I’ve ever known,” Dell’Olio says. “I don’t know many men or women who could do that and not just break down—interview someone to take over a company and you know you’re going to die.

By the time Karan was ready to give birth, Klein was at Mount Sinai Hospital in grave condition. “I went into labor in the office,” Karan says. “Anne’s in one hospital; I’m in another.

“The office called and wanted to know: When are you coming back to work? I called the doctor and asked him, ‘When can I go back to work?’ He says a week, and they sent me home.

“They bring the entire company to the house. I think they’re coming to see my baby! How nice!” Karan remembers. “One day, everyone is there. And Betty Hanson [one of the Anne Klein executives] picks up the phone. Every face goes blank. She said, ‘Anne just died.’”

“I said, ‘I can’t believe no one told me just how sick she really was!’ They didn’t want to tell me; they wanted me to finish the collection. The next day, the collection was supposed to open; instead, there was a funeral. Then I went to work the next day.

“If anybody had said this was going to happen to me, I’d have said, ‘You’re stark raving mad.’

“I’ve always thought about Versailles,” Karan continues. “It was the turning point in my life. Versailles was the last time I was with Anne.”15

At only twenty-five years old, Karan, working with Dell’Olio, kept the Anne Klein brand churning until 1984, when Taki and his business partner Frank Mori offered Karan financial backing to launch her own brand. It began with “seven easy pieces”—a pragmatic and feminine mix-and-match take on modern, professional sportswear and an unabashed reflection of Klein’s personal philosophy about design.

“Everything I know about fashion,” Karan says, “I learned from Anne: sportswear, the body, seven easy pieces.”16

After Karan’s departure, the Anne Klein collection continued on under Dell’Olio until 1993, but then started to slip into decline as other designers began to cycle through. First was Richard Tyler, who was a masterful tailor based in Los Angeles, but his sensibility was more Hollywood flash than businesslike. Then Patrick Robinson, who’d been a lead designer at Giorgio Armani in Milan, stepped in. But he was never able to give the collection enough personality to distinguish it from the now widespread competition.

Before its demise, the company helped usher in the era of bridge collections—modestly priced lines that took their style cues from the flagship brand. But in 1996, Taki and Mori closed the high-end collection, the part of the business that had represented the dynamic, sophisticated new professional woman on the Versailles stage. It had been losing money for years, but it had recently become the target of scathing press reviews. As it was no longer even a positive vehicle for publicity, the owners saw no reason to keep propping it up.

The company enjoyed a brief resuscitation under new owners, Jones Apparel Group, which hired iconoclastic designer Isabel Toledo to create a top-level collection. But in 2007, the company finally succumbed. It was folded into Jones Apparel, where, for six years, they produced $100 dresses and $200 suits before being sold to Sycamore Partners, a private equity firm, in 2013.

If Bill Blass and Anne Klein were slowly extinguished, Halston flamed out like a comet. Halston, who was so proud of the cachet associated with his name, became an enduring symbol of the professional disaster that can strike when a designer loses control of his brand. Whereas Halston had once been “an example of everything a designer could want,” read a profile of him in the New York Times, he became “an example of everything a designer hopes to avoid.”17

Halston came back to New York from Versailles full of bluster about how great he had been, how he’d lived up to his superstar billing. He was eagerly pressing onward, building a bigger and bigger brand, all the while luxuriating in the accoutrements of wealth and fame.

After Norton Simon purchased his company, Halston moved from East Sixty-eighth Street into princely offices in the new Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue. There were limousines, bouquets of orchids, and a view of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There had always been designers who lived well, but Halston began to represent something different. His notoriety broke through the confining walls of the fashion industry and flooded into the popular culture. He was glossy, calculating, and a regular on the party scene, which by 1977 included the legendary club Studio 54.

Studio 54 became Halston’s regular haunt. He shifted his work hours to accommodate his new social life. He’d stay out until four or five in the morning and, instead of arriving in his atelier by 8 a.m., he’d saunter in around noon.18 Halston’s reality was, in fact, the dream that his clothes evoked—sexy, glamorous, and unbridled.

Despite being part of a conglomerate, Halston wanted to have a hand in every product, whether it was a tunic, luggage, or perfume. As his company grew, his desire to micromanage became impossible; he was only clogging up the decision-making process. But Halston’s business troubles went deeper than an obsessive attention to detail. The products became more diffuse, and in 1983 he agreed to launch a lower-priced collection for JCPenney.

Halston was not bullied into the JCPenney line by corporate moneymen. He was enthusiastic about the project. He loved the idea of dressing America. Besides, it would add to his already fat bank account. But this was before high-end designers regularly dabbled in the mass market—before one-off collections for Target and H&M. Halston’s longtime supporter Bergdorf Goodman, the snooty specialty store that had given him his start, dropped his signature collection once he signed on with JCPenney, sending a clear statement that the brand had lost its luster.

By then, as one corporate parent was swallowed by another, the Halston label was getting a new owner every six months. With each transition, Halston became a smaller, less-beloved fish in an ever-expanding pond. By 1984, it had become a division of Beatrice Foods, and the designer was shown the door. “The game plans had all changed and I was invited by them to leave the office, to leave Olympic Tower,” he said. “So I left.”19

He was never able to regain ownership of his trademark and never again designed professionally under his own name.

Halston left New York and moved to San Francisco, where he died of AIDS in 1990. He asked his family to auction the Rolls-Royce he’d purchased the year before and donate the proceeds to AIDS research.20

Since his death, the label has been in a near constant state of revival, with designers Randolph Duke, Kevan Hall, Bradley Bayou, Marco Zanini, and Marios Schwab all attempting, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate it. It has also had myriad consultants, from celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe to actress Sarah Jessica Parker. No one has been able to return the once-celebrated fashion house to its glorious apogee. But starry-eyed investors continue to try.

Halston’s truest legacy is in the designer Tom Ford. Ford, who was not only inspired by Halston’s aesthetics but also crafted himself in a similar guise: as a matinee-idol designer, exuding the same unapologetic confidence and panache. Halston’s personal costume was dominated by black turtlenecks and sunglasses; Ford prefers a black suit and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to the middle of a perfectly landscaped chest.

So much of Ford’s work during his tenure as creative director of Gucci, from 1994 to 2004, recalled the slithering sexuality of Halston—most notably a collection of simple, white jersey gowns from fall 1996. When models Carolyn Murphy and Kate Moss walked Ford’s Milan runway that season, every curve of the derriere, line of the leg, and delicate nipple was apparent, even though the garments themselves were relatively modest in cut. The models’ skin glowed as if they’d just emerged from the hot scrum of a dance floor. A single spotlight followed them, and “Under the Influence of Love” played in the background. It was a track from the same 1973 Love Unlimited album that had played for the Americans at Versailles.

“If you’re going to be a fashion designer and you’re going to be relevant, you have to be part of the time. You also have to have a sense of history and pick up the spirit of those who came before you and then make it your own,” Ford said during a 2012 talk at the 92nd Street Y in New York. “You can take a direct line from me to Halston, but you can take Halston back to Madeleine Vionnet.”21

When Ford added Yves Saint Laurent to his workload in 1999, he did due diligence in researching the house’s history. But his work continued to display a louche attitude that recalled the best of Halston.

While Ford was at Saint Laurent, the French dismissed him as a mere stylist—that old-fashioned word the French used to distinguish commercial dressmakers from couturiers. In truth, Ford was a commercial designer. He was American, after all. His expertise was not cutting and draping. It was in the equally complex and nuanced realm of seduction, of storytelling. In 2004, Ford left both Gucci and Saint Laurent. He directed the film A Single Man, for which actor Colin Firth was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010.

When Ford launched an eponymous women’s collection in 2010, he debuted it in a style that Halston would have loved. He gathered his famous friends, from actress Julianne Moore to singer Beyoncé, to walk a meandering runway in his New York boutique in front of an audience of some one hundred journalists. Afterward, champagne corks popped and the crowd rushed to congratulate the designer. Amazingly, per Ford’s demand, not a single image of the collection leaked to the public before he released photos several months later. The sex appeal, celebrity, and control of that event were pure Halston.

While other American brands faded in the years after their founders passed away, Stephen Burrows’s company fizzled on his own watch.

Burrows internalized the Versailles experience, tucking it away in his memory. Unlike his friend Halston, he didn’t use it to burnish his reputation. Bragging wasn’t in his nature. He shared a few stories about Versailles with friends, telling them about the majesty of the Théâtre Gabriel and the fancy candlelit dinner that followed the show. But Burrows’s friends had no idea who the society ladies were; they were unimpressed by the European nobility. They did, however, relate to the sense of victory. “They understood the us-versus-them aspect of the event. We kicked their asses. That’s what they responded to,” Burrows says.22

The young designer didn’t even bother mentioning the trip to his parents—not even his mother, who’d been so proud of him when he took up residence at Henri Bendel. “She wouldn’t know the significance of such a thing,” Burrows explains. “She wouldn’t know what Versailles meant at all. I’d have to explain that to her.” He didn’t bother.

Burrows returned from Versailles with a new career waiting on Seventh Avenue, where he had opened his own business with ubiquitous investors Ben Shaw and Guido de Natale. The next step was a fragrance, which he was preparing to create with the help of Max Factor. It was to be an answer to Charlie, the fragrance Revlon introduced in early 1973. In 1975, Burrows signed a contract for $50,000 plus royalties.23 He was the first African American designer with a signature scent. Halston had helped him broker the deal.

After months of sampling possible scents, Max Factor settled on a juice with floral notes, undercurrents of lemon, and a hint of musk. “I liked it, but I liked something else even more because it smelled like a circus,” Burrows remembers. “But they don’t go with your favorite. They go with what tests well.”24

He didn’t care for the packaging either—a spherical bottle with a donut-shaped stopper. A stylized “S” was carved into the glass. He wanted something more offbeat, something asymmetrical, like what Max Factor had done for Halston. But the company had just gone through the wringer working with Halston on his fragrance. The demanding designer had spent close to a year digging in his heels, determined that his friend the jewelry designer Elsa Peretti would create his bottle. He refused to budge on his affection for her bean-shaped, asymmetrical flask with its off-center opening that defied the efficiency of standard production. “They’d had so much trouble with Halston’s bottle, they didn’t want to do it again,” Burrows sighs.25

The result was a scent that was not Burrows’s favorite, packaged in a bottle the designer didn’t particularly like. Nonetheless, the fragrance, dubbed Stephen B., debuted in department stores and was a million-dollar hit. Advertisements featured a trio of models—including Jaclyn Smith, before her Charlie’s Angels success—and a smaller image of the designer himself wearing a white suit and red shirt. The copy read: “Meet Stephen B.: the laughing, loving, dancing, fresh and freeing new fragrance from fashion designer Stephen Burrows.”

Stephen B. was marketed as a prestige fragrance, and as Burrows traveled around the country promoting it, he was especially proud of its positioning. He may have bragged about wanting to dress the world, but every designer loves a little snob appeal. After a year, however, Max Factor started selling the fragrance to grocery stores and discounters, in search of a more diverse audience. It lost its panache, and Burrows became angry and frustrated. In the throes of endless contract battles over distribution with Max Factor, he accepted a settlement of about $90,000. He didn’t want to fight it out in court. He was done with his own fragrance. And by 1982, Stephen B. was dead.26

But Burrows had struggles even before the fragrance debacle. His clothing line had stopped selling. The manufacturing was off. The distributors didn’t understand that his jersey dresses would stretch out of shape on hangers. They needed to be folded on shelves, a more time-consuming process and one that made it more difficult for consumers to see exactly what was being pitched to them. Burrows wouldn’t make his frustrations heard because he didn’t want an argument. He hated confrontations and avoided them at all costs. But he wasn’t happy. He began to believe that his decision to move to Seventh Avenue was the cause of all his problems.

In 1976, he went back to Henri Bendel: all was forgiven. Once again he was a paid employee, but this time he was making twice the salary that had caused him to walk out. He was also a partner in the studio. His return was satisfying, though not as electrifying as when he’d first arrived there fresh from O Boutique.

When The Limited Inc. bought Bendel’s in 1985, Burrows left again, and once more looked for success on Seventh Avenue. “I couldn’t find partners I wanted to work with,” he says. Finally, he closed his business. He designed costumes for the off-Broadway gospel musical Mama, I Want to Sing! which his old Fire Island cohort Vy Higginsen had cowritten and produced. And he relied on private clients: “Nice Jewish ladies from Fire Island who kept buying my things,” he says. “I did a great cash business.”27

Burrows spent much of the 1990s living quietly, designing a bed-and-breakfast in Harlem and caring for sick family members. The industry lost track of him.

Beginning in 2002, Burrows started making comeback attempts with regularity, each more disheartening than the one that preceded it. The boomerang kid bounced back to Henri Bendel, brought in by a new general manager, Ed Burstell, who welcomed him with a rollicking party during New York’s Fashion Week. Burstell called Burrows out of the blue, inspired because what the designer had always done “dovetailed with what was going on in fashion,” he says. “There’s no denying the incredible talent that spans many, many years. Some of the things from the archive are just as timely today as then.”28

The plan was for Burrows to once again be a designer in residence, selling the collection through Bendel’s and wholesaling it to other retailers. But other retailers didn’t bite. The shop closed within a year.

In the midst of his struggles, Burrows was introduced to John Robert Miller. He was an unapologetic Anglophile, a former Halston assistant, and a private-label designer for Bendel’s. And, as it turned out, he was a true believer in Burrows’s talent.

Miller, a sprawling, barrel-chested man with close-cropped blond hair, wanted to write Burrows’s biography. Soon Miller became a near constant presence in Burrows’s professional life and his work on the book, which was never finished, expanded into his acting as managing director of the company.

What Miller lacked in financial and marketing expertise, he made up for in devotion. While Burrows’s friends privately expressed concern that Miller wasn’t the man for the job of turning around a threadbare business, there was no one else to do it. Miller helped to organize fashion shows on shoestring budgets supplied by friends and sponsors. They were disorganized and chaotic, often with novice models who weren’t up to the standards of the clothes. One season, Diane von Furstenberg, a friend, opened her New York City Meatpacking District studio to Burrows. The show drew longtime fans, but not much came of it.

In 2006, Burrows was presented with an extraordinary opportunity: a chance to return to Paris for the first time since Versailles. He was invited to present a spring 2007 collection at the Carrousel du Louvre, the subterranean warren of auditoriums attached to the famous museum. It wasn’t a landmark event, but still, it was exciting.

Reliable pal Bethann Hardison helped Burrows and Miller organize the Paris show. Burrows wanted to recapture the magic of Versailles. He encouraged his models to be creative and expressive with their movements. He wanted them to be advocates for his clothes.

When the show opened, the models, a diverse mix of young women, wore a pretty selection of jersey dresses in shades of raspberry, melon, grape, and lemon, all finished with his signature lettuce hem. They began clapping in unison as they marched down the runway. They flirted and twirled and smiled. But as Vollbracht had found when he borrowed from the past at Bill Blass, the effect was sweet nostalgia. It was old-fashioned. Models no longer carry on like that. They’d stopped smiling sometime around 1993, when Kate Moss and other grumpy, awkward waifs began to dominate the industry. There was no going back. Fashion leaves behind those who don’t step lively, no matter how glorious their pasts.

The old guard of fashion editors, now retired, came to witness Burrows’s return. They remembered how wonderfully innovative he had been. But the new crop of working editors from magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle, those who had the power to push him back into the spotlight, did not attend. The rows of seats in the small auditorium reserved for the younger members of the American press remained empty. It didn’t matter. The show looked terribly out of date—like a bit of fashion history from the 1970s. Instead of saving him, the models did Burrows a disservice.

In 2012, Burrows presented a collection at the Audi automotive showroom on Park Avenue, not far from Grand Central station. If ever there was a soulless place for a fashion show, this was it. The showroom was a bland, open space with late-model cars parked against the walls. A large window faced Park Avenue and armies of suit-and-tie drones passed by, oblivious to the fashion show going on inside.

But the backstage had a reassuring hustle and bustle as John Miller wrangled a few television camera crews and photographers who jockeyed to interview the designer and document the prep work. Two makeup artists and a pedicurist simultaneously groomed a young model from Senegal. With her ebony skin, shoulder-length hair, and gamine figure, she was a quintessential Burrows girl. And the designer, dressed in gray jeans and a black T-shirt, with his trusty fanny pack at his waist, moved to and fro giving directions and offering a preview of the collection from two rolling racks filled with clothes.

In the weeks leading up to the show, Burrows had signed a deal to produce a small dungaree collection with Raven Denim. The jeans were finished with red stitching, a reference to the red zigzag stitching he liked to use on his jersey dresses.

With a few words of encouragement to the models—“Enjoy yourself!”—the show began and the young women pranced out. They vamped in front of the showroom’s expansive windows—once again, in the old way. And in the same way the models at his Paris show had seemed out of touch, so did those in New York. They were only doing what Burrows asked, but these girls were a long way from the generation of women of the 1970s who knew how to move with ease and confidence on a runway. These young models, only a few years from pubescence, could barely walk.

It seemed Burrows couldn’t shake his affection for a decade of parties, nightlife, sexual abandon, and business deals built on a friendly nod and a shared acid trip. He was stuck in the past. No one could convince him to move on. He liked what he liked. More important, however, he had stopped going out. He was no longer embedded in popular culture the way he had been in his youth, the way even de la Renta still was. He knew what was going on in the fashion industry, and he watched other, younger designers, with little professional experience, find financial backing. He waited for someone to come to his rescue. And his friends enabled his acquiescent tendencies. “He’s lovable. He’s childlike,” says Audrey Smaltz. The former Ebony fashion editor now runs her own backstage production business, the Ground Crew. “Whatever he asked me to do, I would do it and not even think about it.”29

In 2012, Hardison stepped in again. She introduced Burrows to the Nigerian-born, London-based designer Duro Olowu, who was a longtime fan. Olowu’s star was on the rise. He had smartly fostered relationships with a host of powerful fashion editors and retailers. They were enamored with Olowu’s seventies tailoring, his easy caftans, and his urbane African sensibility, all of which had more than a hint of Burrows’s signature color and ease.

Hardison and Olowu arranged for the influential Chicago retailer Ikram Goldman—the woman who served as fashion consigliere to Michelle Obama—to view a small, specially created Burrows collection. Goldman was an avid supporter of Olowu and had a reputation for getting behind up-and-coming designers and pushing them toward the light.

The group convened in Hardison’s small downtown apartment: Burrows, Olowu, Goldman, and her associates. Two models quietly showed eight looks. Goldman bought five styles—a total of about fifteen pieces. She wanted them in black matte jersey, suggesting the small capsule collection be called “Stephen Burrows Black.”

“It was nice to work with her,” Burrows reflects. “I liked her idea of a black label.… It was simplified, and I like black. It was me, but modern and sleek.”30

Burrows had finally caught a break. He began to sniff around for financing. A designer used to be able to launch a business with $50,000 and the support of a few friends. Today, that money, Burrows says, would be gone in an hour. In his search for funding, he came up empty and the capsule collection fizzled after that one season.

Burrows is loath to suggest that race either limited or propelled his success. He was never the sort of designer to stand on a soapbox and make an argument for diversity. He believed that through his talent he could make the strongest argument for the merits of black designers.

And for a long time, he did just that. In the generation after Versailles, when racial détente seemed tenuous and fragile, but possible, people were primed to celebrate black models and designers. They did so with enthusiasm and sincerity. And Burrows’s achievements opened doors for other black designers whose aesthetics were as diverse as the designers themselves.

Willi Smith, who died in 1987, and Patrick Kelly, who passed away in 1990, both walked through doors Burrows helped open. Smith’s Williwear was a true sportswear collection, already a success when the designer received a burst of attention for creating the groomsmen’s attire for Caroline Kennedy’s wedding to Edwin Schlossberg. Kelly, an overall-wearing Mississippian who built his career on the runways of Paris, was a rebel who reclaimed racist imagery for his own purposes and helped to defuse it of its power to hurt.

Other black designers followed: Jeffrey Banks, Gordon Henderson, Tracy Reese, Olowu. They built signature brands with varying degrees of success. Others, like Edward Wilkerson, who honed his skills working with Donna Karan, have walked tall behind the scenes.

But no other black designer has matched Burrows’s series of milestones. He remains the only black designer to have had a signature fragrance, entertainers and sports stars excepted. Since 1981, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America became the preeminent Seventh Avenue organization, the only black person to be honored with the women’s wear or menswear designer of the year trophy has been entertainer Sean Combs, aka Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Diddy, et al., for his Sean John menswear line in 2004. Burrows received a special citation from the board of directors in 2006. Then in 2014, Public School, codesigned by Maxwell Osborne, who is black, won the CFDA’s menswear designer of the year award.

Still, more black designers were honored during the days of the Coty Awards than by the modern CFDAs.

Burrows rarely speaks of unfairness, burdens, or hurdles. When he does, the remarks come abruptly, almost as if they have escaped despite his best efforts to contain them. Once, during a particularly exasperating professional moment, he wondered aloud why wealthy black investors focused on white designers instead of struggling black ones. He was speaking specifically about Combs, who after starting his own fashion brand, sank money into the company of Zac Posen, an up-and-coming white designer who was the beneficiary of outsize media attention.

Burrows seems baffled by his inability to regain his footing within the fashion industry. But he never admits defeat. He remains convinced of possibilities just over the horizon.

In October 2012, John Robert Miller died from heart failure. He was only fifty-seven. It was a deeply emotional blow to Burrows. Soon after, Burrows closed his studio.

Several months later, Burrows was honored in an event at the Museum of the City of New York. When Fashion Danced opened on March 21, 2013. The first-floor gallery of the museum was packed with well-wishers: members of the fashion community, old friends, folks who had admired Burrows’s work from afar, people who had more than a few of his jersey dresses in the back of their closets. Younger designers came to pay homage to a man whose work had inspired their own sense of aesthetics, their own understanding of what it meant to welcome the influence of the street, of music, of life, into the atelier.

Burrows’s old cohorts from Henri Bendel were there, too, proud of how contemporary so many of the garments looked even though they were more than forty years old. The jersey, the color-blocking, the playfulness, the sexiness, it all spoke to modern times. Burrows’s garments called to mind the work of Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, Lisa Perry, Costello Tagliapietra, and a host of other designers and labels. Burrows’s career may not have endured, but his work had.

His model friends were there, as well. Pat Cleveland danced around for the cameras, her body so thin it looked as if a nudge could break it in half. Now a yoga instructor, Alva Chinn was there to offer her pal a hug. Karen Bjornson-Macdonald, who’d gotten married and raised a family in Connecticut, beamed with pride over Burrows’s talent and over having been there when it was in full bloom. Iman donned a color-blocked Burrows gown that he’d made for her years earlier. It looked magnificent on her curves. Bethann Hardison, collaborator and protector, was by his side throughout the dinner. So was the photographer Charles Tracy, whose images from the 1960s and ’70s filled the pages of the exhibition catalog. And Burrows’s buddy Daniela Morera, who he’d met one night many years ago in a limousine headed to yet another party, wrote a celebratory essay for it.

The evening of the opening, the retailer Target, which sponsored the exhibition, hosted a small dinner to toast Burrows. It wasn’t the King’s Apartments at Versailles, but still, it was a breathtaking setting. A single long table, running the length of a narrow white gallery on the upper level of the museum, was decorated with a rainbow of flowers, their green stems coiled into clear glass vases. Everyone dined on Maine lobster, black bass, and honey-lacquered duck. Ginger tarts and chocolate ganache followed. And of course, there was plenty of wine.

Throughout dinner, a soundtrack of Burrows’s favorite songs played, but mostly the room was warm with the chirping of old friends and young fans. Hardison thanked everyone for coming and expressed her deep affection for Burrows. There was much laughter as Iman and Tracy kibitzed from their seats. And then all eyes shifted to the man of the hour. But Burrows did not make a speech. He said nothing at all.

If the American designers returned to New York more confident and secure in their work, the models came home positively triumphant. The one thing everyone agreed on after Versailles was that the models’ showmanship had altered expectations of what a fashion presentation should and could be. And it was the black models at Versailles who were most responsible for the transformation of those expectations.

For them, the road to Versailles had been cleared by a social storm in the United States—an upheaval in which fashion played an active role. The black models had been building their careers, leaping all sorts of hurdles and wrestling with cultural stereotypes. Many of them had been given their breaks by men like Clovis Ruffin and Burrows who liked to unleash movement and energy on the runway. They had been inspired by dancers, musicians, and performers, by the Ebony Fashion Fair, and by the rhythm of the times. They were denizens of the New York discos full of gay men, black men, and women searching for liberation. They danced down the runways because that was a style that felt natural to them; it was encouraged; it was allowed because their very presence broke so many rules that the rules simply ceased to apply. And their exuberant presence influenced their white counterparts.

At Versailles, Charlene Dash, Alva Chinn, Norma Jean Darden, and the others were not aiming to make a political statement. They were not trying to stand out as exotic or representing some kind of “otherness.” They wanted to be accepted on their own terms; but they also wanted to be part of the fashion community. The Kerner Report had been clear and true. What the models—what the “Negro”—wanted was simple: “fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens.”31

The black models did not see Versailles as a triumph for their race because there were more than black models onstage. For them, it was a victory for Americans. And that meant more than anything else. That’s all they ever wanted it to be. Even for someone like Bethann Hardison, the born rebel, Versailles was not about being black. It was about being good.

Their presence anywhere, however, then as now, raises the subject of race—how far society has progressed toward equality, how segregated society remains, and how fearful people are about continued disenfranchisement. Those in the audience did not simply see American models; they saw models of color. The designers did, too. So did the media. The women were described as “light-skinned blacks,” “the black model,” and so on. It didn’t matter how the models saw themselves. For anyone who knew anything about what happened at Versailles, it wasn’t merely an American success story. There was a separate African American one, too. These models were still categorically, uniquely, exotically black. They had yet to be just great girls.

The show elevated the profile of black models into the stratosphere. The Versailles models didn’t reinvent themselves for their trip across the ocean. In France, they were the models that they had always been. But contrasted with their European counterparts, who moved with such precise and precious calm, the Americans seemed vivid and alive. The difference wasn’t just obvious; it begged for judgment. And the media obliged.

Explained writer Phyllis Feldkamp in a story for the Christian Science Monitor in 1974:

New York models are dancier. They move faster than their Paris counterparts and have a greater knack for dramatizing what they are wearing. Many of the New York girls whose profession it is to show clothes have real star quality—as Parisians discovered when the New York models brought down the house at the Franco-American fashion gala last November in the palace of Versailles.

Some of the girls—like Billie Blair, the reed-slim, dark-skinned beauty who moves like quicksilver—are superstars who hold their audience with disciplined performances on the runway. Hers were the kind of theatrics that brought New York’s big looks to life and put the clothes across more effectively than was the case in Paris.

New York’s black models have been transforming the traditional stilted walk and frozen-face manner of presenting clothes by strutting or gliding sinuously like dancers to dramatize the fashions they are displaying.32

The designers were not longing for the models’ static beauty, their richly colored skin, or their bone structure. Their beauty in repose did not drive their popularity. It was the swivel of their hips and the swing of their shoulders that propelled them toward success.

Versailles opened all sorts of doors. In the 1970s, the trickle of black models into the business that had begun as a matter of social engineering became a steady stream. Black women enjoyed solid careers. They became stars in the industry and racked up landmark moments with a dynamic presence that was in demand for nearly a generation.

In 1974, Beverly Johnson became the first black model to appear on the cover of American Vogue. That year, she made an estimated $100,000. Two years after her notable cover, Iman stepped into the spotlight and soon pushed black models into the “super” realm. Her enduring career as a model, and now as a businesswoman, began with an elaborate discovery myth that described her as an exotic, almost wild creature plucked from the African veldt by the photographer Peter Beard. In a boring truth, Iman was actually a diplomat’s daughter.

The black models of Versailles also stayed busy, even if they did not become brand names. When Jennifer Brice returned to New York, Studio 54 became one of her regular haunts. And she participated in one of the most eccentrically elaborate weddings of the twentieth century: the union of singer Sly Stone and model Kathy Silva in 1974. The couple said their vows onstage at Madison Square Garden before twenty-three thousand fans. Brice was one of a dozen models dressed in black and carrying golden palm fronds who walked in the ceremony. Her dress was by Halston; she’d been chosen for the show by Stephen Burrows. She was not paid. “You get popular first,” she said at the time, “then rich.”33 Brice left New York in 1987. She had not gotten rich. By 1994 she’d settled in Atlanta, a married woman with four children, one of whom she lost to cancer.

Alva Chinn moved up to being a $2,500-a-day model in New York and Europe.34 Charlene Dash and Norma Jean Darden continued to work the runway for nearly a decade. Dash retired in New York and settled into life as a bureaucrat in the city government. Darden, who was left with a significant scar after misdiagnosed peritonitis, left fashion and built a restaurant and catering business, Spoonbread, Inc., based on family recipes. She successfully operates from a home base in Harlem.

Pat Cleveland continued to build her career in New York, but really came into her own in Europe. She was a star there and continues to occasionally walk a runway even as her daughter Anna van Ravenstein carries on the tradition. Amina Warsuma moved to Los Angeles and tried her hand at acting and filmmaking. Barbara Jackson eventually moved to Los Angeles, as well, where her first husband was in the music business. She modeled until the birth of her second child. She’s now remarried and a content grandmother who volunteers with Dress for Success. Ramona Saunders passed away in the mid-eighties. The circumstances of her death remain stubbornly cloudy, but Burrows remembers that she had returned to Brazil.

The great Billie Blair stayed in New York for two decades. In her younger years, no one was counseling her on the wisdom of stashing money away for retirement. All she knew was that she was getting a check and it was hers to spend at a time when it was good to be young, in New York, and flush with cash. She lived the fast life at nightclubs for many years before finally burning out.

In 1987, she returned home to Flint, which had become a depressed, half-empty city—dull and nearly defeated. She enrolled at Saginaw Valley State University intent on becoming a parish nurse, a registered nurse who incorporates religion and spirituality into her practice. But she only lasted about a year; it was spreading the word of God that interested her, not organic chemistry. The model was called to minister.

“It was around October 7, 1987, when I knew that God had a calling on my life,” Blair says. “I was in Detroit at Straight Gate [International] Church,” which is nondenominational.

“I saw a silhouette of Jesus in a vision. I was crying. I had my hands lifted and my eyes were closed and I talked to Him. I wanted the truth,” Blair says. “I saw the shape of His head and shoulders. There were no blue eyes; there was no flat nose. I saw a silhouette and beams of light from around His head.

“And there He was. He just covered me,” Blair says. “It was quick. Quick as quick! Amen.”35 It was not a conversion as gripping as that of Saul on the road to Damascus. But for Blair, it was a moment of clarity, reassurance, and rebirth.

Blair no longer has the angular, wispy silhouette of her youth. Time has allowed her figure to become more solid. But she remains a tall, slender woman with a sleek blond bob, who relies on a pair of stylishly rectangular glasses for reading. She has retained the effervescence that designers found so compelling during her heyday. She speaks in emotional fragments, sharing fully realized and cherished memories and deeply felt mini-sermons about the power of God and the richness of His blessings.

As if moved by the memory of her sacred conversion vision, as if possessed by the Holy Spirit—or believing herself to be—Blair murmurs in an unintelligible tongue. She tilts her lineless face to the heavens, extends her arms in supplication, and speaks aloud in the prophetic tradition. Without a hint of self-consciousness, Blair engages in a public communion with her God.

Raised in the Baptist church, Blair had always been spiritual. She’d regularly recite a quiet prayer before every fashion show. Evangelism, however, came as a revelation. It gave her a new purpose and a soft landing after a high-flying career. Blair was ordained as a minister in 1995 by the nondenominational Faith Tech Ministries Bible School.36 She followed friends to Defiance, Ohio, where she manages on a fixed income of Social Security benefits.

“The first time I had to pay taxes, my mother and father had worked and they got money back. I thought I was going to get money back, but they said I had to pay. I was sick for three days!” Blair says. “I appreciate the models who came along later and did something and took this business to another level, like Tyra [Banks]. There are some others. Maybe not as well known. Another model has a vintage store. A lot of little businesswomen came out of this. My business? I’m about my Father’s business. Ministry.”37

Defiance is an incongruous place for a former model, particularly an African American one without any familial connections, to spend her retirement years. With a population of about seventeen thousand, plus forty thousand more who live in the county, Defiance is a deeply conservative, working-class community with an economy ruled by General Motors and a cultural life dominated by Catholicism and Republicans. It is 88 percent white, with an African American population of less than 4 percent.

Blair often feels isolated there and at odds with neighbors who have led far more constricted lives than hers. And she sees racism in the slights and unkind words from some of them. She stays because it is too expensive to move and because the town is home to Defiance College, a small liberal arts school with about one thousand students. The school is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, a denomination that believes in prophetic worship. It’s where Blair is studying theology. “Eventually I’ll have a PhD,” she says. “I’ll be a theologian.”38

* * *

On into the 1980s and early ’90s, black models walked the runway with gusto and flair. People knew their names, and in some cases they were more famous than the designers whose clothes they wore. Almost all of these black women had a distinctive runway style. The caricature of the high-stepping model, whose hips whiplashed violently from side to side as one foot crossed the other in a death-defying act of balance, was born during this time.

This was the era that brought a teenage Naomi Campbell to the fore. She was a striking Londoner with close-cropped hair and dance training. She walked the runway like she was personally hunting her evening meal. With her distinctive strut, Campbell solidified her place in history as part of a triumvirate of models with Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, women who dominated the runways, ratcheted up the pay scale, and became celebrities beyond the catwalk.

Around that same time, Tyra Banks bounced, sashayed, and flirted down the runway. Her stage presence was so compelling that the fashion industry welcomed her pinup-girl cleavage, which would traditionally have disqualified her from a career that demands that a woman have the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. Banks became the first African American Sports Illustrated swimsuit-cover model in 1996.

And Detroit’s Veronica Webb swanned down the international runways, maintaining an expression of silent amusement, as if she was just a little too sophisticated for the catwalk silliness. By 1992, Revlon had signed Webb to a cosmetics deal, making her the first African American model to represent a makeup brand.

In the 1980s and ’90s, designers didn’t just encourage models to emote, they treated their runway presentations like dance parties. In the early 1990s, some of the hottest invitations were those for the shows of designers like Todd Oldham and Anna Sui who used popular music to create a joyful energy. Beside their runways, the crowd shrieked with delight, encouraging the models to really whoop it up, to really strut. People expected to see the clothes, but they came to see the girls—many of whom were black—and the antics, too. They came for contemporary entertainment.

It’s no surprise that during this period a black drag queen named RuPaul rose to fame. She served as a hyperbolic version of the black runway diva. RuPaul is part caricature, part adoring fan, part savvy entrepreneur. Her style of exaggerated strutting remains a beloved trope of neighborhood drag queens, Mahogany fanatics, schoolgirls, and amateur models “working it” on makeshift catwalks in fellowship halls, university auditoriums, and hotel ballrooms.

Black models succeeded and thrived in ways only fantasized about back in the 1970s. They became cultural stars and crossed boundaries. Bethann Hardison, who retired from modeling and opened her own talent agency in 1984, was a player in many of these success stories—nurturing, supporting, and in some cases helping to broker contracts. Thanks to her natural temperament and upbringing, Hardison became a leading activist for diversity within the fashion industry. And in 1989, she cofounded the Black Girls Coalition to celebrate the successes of black women in fashion and to organize their collective good fortune for philanthropic purposes.

But her greatest industry accomplishment might well have been the breakthrough success of a black male model she managed: Tyson Beckford.

In 1993, designer Ralph Lauren signed Beckford as the face of his Polo men’s division. In doing so, Lauren shrewdly exploited the frisson of race as aesthetic, identity, and stereotype. With his almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and dark skin, Beckford was a distinctly black man who was unabashedly muscular and macho. His presence was freighted with prejudices yearning to define him as dangerous, thuggish, and uncivilized. Lauren, at the height of his fame as a designer of preppy fashion, dressed Beckford in everything from anoraks to tailored suits—the most idealized versions of the Establishment’s uniforms for work and play. In doing so, he created powerful images that upended cultural ideals regarding privilege and power.

But despite his daring, Lauren only exploited simmering racial tensions. He didn’t defuse them. As Lauren went on to win countless awards and become a prince of Wall Street with a stratospheric initial public offering, the broader culture had yet to be fully convinced of a wider definition of the aesthetics of American success and beauty. Lauren’s company would be accused of racial discrimination in its treatment of employees more than once in successive years. Incidents would flare and the company would tamp them down like a stubborn fire.

By the mid-nineties, the industry’s affection for black models began to wane. Contemporary designers, in both New York and Paris, mostly stopped hiring models based on their ability to show the clothes—to sell them through gesture and personality. Designers wanted a new runway aesthetic. They wanted total control over their vision, including how it was presented on the catwalk. They now aimed to create a cohesive runway tableau. They wanted women whose stage presence would not compete with the clothes or the designers themselves.

Oh sure, designers would still indulge in elaborate sets. And the clothes would sometimes take on the look of art projects. But the models? They were walking hangers. Only rarely were there exceptions. John Galliano, in his early years, asked his models to emote on his runway. But they were playing a character of Galliano’s choosing. They were not revealing their own personalities.

The industry no longer had call for models who were defined as boldly individual, which meant the industry no longer had much need for black models who had always been connected to personal showmanship.

Black models were pushed aside to make room for the gawky, grunge sensibility of Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, Kristen McMenamy, and the like. Not only were models purposely more homogenous in appearance, any hint of personality or individuality was stage-directed out of them.

The generation of models who had starred at Versailles could only look at what had become of their industry and shake their head in disappointment and bewilderment. They hadn’t gotten rich from Versailles, but in their scrapbook of memories, they thought they’d made a difference. But what had so entranced the industry was something other than their high cheekbones, brown skin, and slim hips. The French were not captivated by the beauty of the American models, but by their physicality. As Pierre Bergé noted, the success was in the choreography—Thompson’s professional version and the designers’ amateur instructions—and the American models’ execution of it.

Did the models of Versailles help the fashion industry see that black was beautiful? Truly, fundamentally beautiful? Or did it only see trendy, politically correct mannequins executing a beautiful performance that reflected the particular rhythms of an era? In the ensuing years, in matters of race, laws, language, and business, practices changed. But hearts? The answer is not so definitive.

The default standard of beauty had always been white and it remains so. It doesn’t matter that the increasingly commercial and global fashion trade has, as its fastest growing markets, regions such as Asia, India, and South America.

Hardison closed her agency in 1996, which meant the loss of one of the few firms that made a pointed effort to recruit models of color. By the start of the twenty-first century, designer preferences had turned to the blondes of Scandinavia. Then they drifted to Brazil—but only the most fair-skinned women of that diverse South American country. The era of the Brazilian bombshell, led by Gisele Bündchen, mostly left out black models. After they grew bored with Brazil, model scouts swarmed the streets of Russia, the Czech Republic, and the myriad countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. In the first decade of the new millennium, were it not for the Ethiopian-born Liya Kebede, black models would have practically disappeared from the runway.

The number of working black models in high-profile runway presentations or appearing on the covers of magazines became so dire that stories began appearing in the mainstream media about the “whitewashing” of the runway and what it meant for cultural perceptions of beauty, femininity, and worth. The homogeneity continued for a decade. Finding success on the runway was already a bit like winning the lottery, genetic and otherwise. But if fair-skinned women were having a run of good luck, their darker-skinned colleagues were stuck in a losing streak.

By 2007, activists went public with their dissatisfaction in town hall meetings. Hardison, joined by Iman and Naomi Campbell, led the effort. Around this time, Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue, admitted that while the industry was flush with Asian models and a few black models had made headway—such as Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman, and Joan Smalls, who is from Puerto Rico—“sadly we don’t see as many African American models as we could.”39

An Italian publication would make the strongest visual argument on behalf of black models. In 2008, Franca Sozzani, the editor of Vogue Italia, produced “The Black Issue.” It featured only black models in its fashion editorials. After it sold out its initial print run of 120,000 copies, it was reprinted for the German, British, and American markets, where readers had turned it into a collector’s item. Two years later, Sozzani reflected that the issue was born out of activism, business acumen, and personal boredom with runways.

“All the girls looked the same,” Sozzani said in 2010. “The only one who stood out is Liya Kebede. Everything she wore, I liked. I started to question myself.”

“We go looking for tall, thin, and blue eyes. But we have to scout in Africa, everywhere,” Sozzani said. “I decided to do an issue only with black girls. People say, ‘It’s a ghetto.’ But we do thousands of issues with Russian girls and it’s not a ghetto.” 40

The attention to diversity was not sustained. By 2013, Hardison had begun hand-counting the numbers of black models on the runways in New York and Europe. And in shows where she found only one black model, or none, she spoke up. “I’m not calling anyone a racist,” Hardison explains, “but the result is racist. It’s a racist act.

“I do think there has been progress,” she adds. “But I don’t see the progress as well as the stability.” 41

Versailles was a mile marker along a very long, twisting highway that has had more than a few hairpin turns.

“Maybe I won’t see it in my life,” said Naomi Sims in 1968. “But there will come a day when it will be quite common to see a Negro face on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue.” 42 Sims died in 2009. And the sight of a black model on the cover of any mainstream fashion magazine remains uncommon.

There is no political push for the fashion industry to keep its ranks diverse. Fashion isn’t deemed important enough today to demand that attention—not like when the authors of the Kerner Report were at work. But there is at least one steady point of pressure: Hardison. She continues to cajole, embarrass, and insist. And in 2014, the Council of Fashion Designers of America honored Hardison for her work on diversity at its annual awards gala.

* * *

During the decade of the Versailles show, prominent women in political, social, and intellectual circles still publicly discussed their wardrobes and reporters soberly chronicled their purchases—not merely out of gossipy interest, but because what these women wore meant something. Their choices influenced the masses, their attention to style raised the profile of designers, and the sales were good for the economy. Fashion was equated with dignity and duty.

The Versailles show was meant to speak to these women. And it did. It changed their perception of American fashion, and, eventually, of fashion in general. Fashion, as seen through the eyes of designers like Klein, Halston, Burrows, and those who followed immediately in their footsteps, ceased to focus on hemline rules, social propriety, and enshrining beauty in a perfect couture suit. The rules of dress began to disintegrate, and society became more informal. Women looked to fashion as a source of freedom, workplace costuming, and aesthetic delight. And for a time, fashion complied, with the introduction of Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dress, Liz Claiborne’s modest separates, Donna Karan’s seven easy pieces, and even Italian designer Giorgio Armani’s seductive, menswear-style tailoring.

But by the 1980s and into the new millennium, fashion’s cultural influence and symbolism exploded and evolved until it became what it is today: an enormous and unwieldy global business ostentatiously fueled by entertainment, status, and the artfully esoteric. And as fashion changed, its intimate relationship with its main customers—women—frayed.

Women became distrustful of fashion, doubtful that it had anything important to say either to them personally or about their place in the world. What did crinoline underskirts, grunge, dropped crotch trousers, and logo-infested jackets have to do with climbing a corporate ladder or running a political campaign? Freed of fashion’s tyranny, women have been at turns vengeful and dismissive of the industry. They regularly decry the disconnection between “real women” and those depicted in the pages of fashion magazines. Instead of understanding a model to be a fanciful, dynamic stand-in for the average woman, they see her as an underfed, underage alien.

Very few people now care what socialites are wearing—that is, unless they have been propelled onto their own reality show through purloined sex tapes, mudslinging divorces, or some other sordid spat. The only women happily detailing the designer of every garment on their back, right down to their Spanx, are starlets, who are dressed and given their talking points by professional stylists and gifted their gowns by designers whose marketing departments have determined that the starlet reflects the “brand.”

The new breed of influential women, women of authority, freed from fashion’s oppressive demands and with myriad options for moving up in life—options that do not involve marrying well—see fashion as belittling, too dangerously glitzy and superficial to even engage. They avoid discussing fashion. There is little upside. Power and fashion do not go together.

In 2009, a reporter asked then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to hold the position, who designed the evening gown she was wearing as she arrived at the White House for a state dinner. The question was posed as Pelosi walked across the marble foyer of the Booksellers area, the White House equivalent of a red carpet, a place where such questions are standard. She responded with an expression of stony, glaring silence.

Pelosi later explained that her expression had not been intended to shame the questioner for chauvinistic effrontery, but was rather the result of frustration at her own inability to recall the designer’s name.

Taking Pelosi at her word, why should she remember some designer’s name? The power structure has grown increasingly suspicious of women who are more than a little fashionable. When the stylish Desirée Rogers arrived in Washington from Chicago in 2009 to take on the role of social secretary in the Obama administration, the media celebrated her for giving the nation’s capital a dash more glamour. The former corporate executive had a fashion-forward wardrobe that was age appropriate, sophisticated, but with a bit of whimsy.

But Rogers’s White House career imploded when two reality television show stars crashed the Obamas’ first state dinner. Rogers wasn’t responsible for security, but her office was in charge of the dinner. She was on the hot seat and the furor over her glossy public persona only added to the heat. Rogers had been tucked into the front row at New York’s Fashion Week. She wore Nina Ricci. She had worn an avant-garde Comme des Garçons dress for that infamous state dinner, and it was far more notable than the gown worn by the First Lady.

In a flurry of controversy, congressional hearings, and brutal calls for her head, Rogers resigned. Her replacement was Julianna Smoot, an experienced political operative and fund-raiser whose public style could be summed up as reassuringly beige.43

There is now a stubborn, artificial divide. Serious women wear clothes. Fashion is a shallow, flaccid amusement. Our culture is losing faith in fashion’s ability to empower, to change the world. Fashion is left to exist in an ever-expanding, mesmerizing bubble. Until the bubble finally bursts.

* * *

Fashion was once a kind of cultural currency with profound value. It commanded respect. Models could uplift a race. The economics of fashion resonated from Seventh Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue. Creativity in the atelier evoked national pride. Aesthetics spoke eloquently of freedom: sexual, gender, political.

The success of Versailles gave the American designers a jolt of confidence, but it had an even broader impact. As American sportswear and informality gained legitimacy, it helped fuel a transformation that made fashion less dogmatic, more democratic and invigorating. Fashion became a flashy, exuberant, open party that seemed to welcome everyone. That openness was an enormous shift from the past, in which fashion was a private club for society’s elite.

Following Versailles, fashion was no longer an artful tool for organizing, taming, and understanding society. It became brash entertainment—suspect to many, but irresistible. Fashion ceased being discreet and precise. There was no longer a singular lingua franca of fashion. It was broken down into countless dialects, leaving room for misunderstandings and gaffes.

Fashion became a form of tribal communication. It allows myriad groups to speak to each other, at each other, and over each other through wardrobe decisions that are at once simple and provocative. Everything from designer handbags and shoes to sneakers are now a measure of status and power. Hoodies, baggy jeans, and oversized T-shirts complicate race relations. Short skirts, tight blouses, leggings, and thongs have become lightning rods in gender conflicts.

Fashion feeds a constant cultural conversation with intermittent spikes of media saturation and personal punditry. The Academy Awards, for example, are as much a fashion show as they are a celebration of cinema, with viewers debating the fashion choices with as much vigor as the winner of Best Actress or Best Picture. The presidential inauguration marks a day when every American becomes a fashion critic and the inaugural gown becomes emblematic of national pride. Periodically a politician wears something out of the ordinary, inappropriate, or provocative. And voters admire, criticize, and gawk. The Internet is littered with blogs, online magazines, and fan sites devoted to fashion. Everyone is a fashion authority.

Fashion speaks more loudly than it ever did. It isn’t quite a tower of Babel, but it is a daily cacophony of crosstalk. It is more important than ever to listen. Fashion has ceased to be the religion of women, revered and followed on pure faith. After Versailles, fashion broke free of the ateliers, its cherished cathedrals, and entered the public square.

Fashion no longer serves as a way of unifying the culture. Instead, it delineates the differences and forces the difficult question: How much do those differences matter?