Arthur McGee

Arthur Lee McGee was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1933 in Detroit, Michigan. His mother, Rose, was a dressmaker who created her own original designs, and it was at her side that the boy first learned the language of cloth, cut, and line. That early apprenticeship in a working woman's home would shape a lifetime of craft.

Winning a scholarship, McGee moved to New York and studied costume design at the Traphagen School of Fashion, graduating in 1951, before continuing in millinery and apparel design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he studied under the master couturier Charles James. In 1957, at just twenty-four, he became the first African American designer to run a design studio on Seventh Avenue, in the heart of Manhattan's garment district — a threshold no Black designer had been permitted to cross before him.

Across the 1960s and 1970s, McGee gave American couture a new vocabulary, drawing on African and Asian traditions with looser silhouettes and African textiles — kimono sleeves cut from African scarves, a Zulu-blanket coat. His work was carried by Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Henri Bendel, and he dressed Lena Horne, Cicely Tyson, and Stevie Wonder. His garments entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Known as the "Dean of African American Designers," he mentored Willi Smith, Stephen Burrows, Scott Barrie, and B. Michael, and kept an open studio for any young designer of color seeking a way in. He died in New York City on the first of July 2019, at the age of eighty-six. He opened a door, and held it open for all who came after — may his name be honored.