Jay Jaxon

Jay Jaxon was born Eugene Jackson on the thirtieth of August 1941, in Jamaica, Queens, within the great tapestry of New York City. A child of Black America in the years after the Great Migration, he first set his mind toward the law before the pull of design turned his path toward the needle, the muslin, and the cutting table.

In the late 1960s he crossed to Paris, where he learned within the ateliers of the masters, apprenticing amid the houses of Yves Saint Laurent and, under Marc Bohan, of Christian Dior. In 1969 the couturier Jean-Louis Scherrer called him to his own house, and there Jaxon rose to lead the atelier as its creative designer, presenting haute couture under the Scherrer name. He stood, by the record of the French press of that day, as the first American and the first Black man to work as a couturier in a Paris atelier.

Returning to the United States in the mid-1970s, he built his own label with an eye toward refined high-end sportswear, and later, from Los Angeles, dressed figures of stage and song. Among those who wore his hand were Annie Lennox, Sammy Davis Jr., Liza Minnelli, and Thelma Houston.

He died on the nineteenth of July 2006. For years his name went unspoken in the histories that should have carried it; the labor of later scholars has begun to restore him to his rightful place. May Jay Jaxon be remembered as a pioneer who carried the dignity of his people into the highest houses of Paris, and honored for the beauty he gave the world.