Mychael Knight

Mychael Knight was born on the eleventh of April 1978 in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, and came of age across the American South, spending much of his childhood in Montgomery, Alabama. He completed high school in Washingtonville, New York, in 1996, and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in apparel design and merchandising from Georgia Southern University in 2001.

Settling in Atlanta, Knight began in the fashion trade as an intern and soon made his name as a stylist in the music industry. In 2006 he stepped onto the national stage as a contestant on the third season of Project Runway, where his craftsmanship and warmth carried him to a fourth-place finish and earned him the season's Fan Favorite award — a designer beloved as much for his character as for his cloth.

He turned that visibility into a house of his own. In 2007 he introduced his self-titled label on BET's Rip the Runway and designed a line of custom tees for Starbucks; the years that followed brought his lingerie line Kitty & Dick and his unisex fragrance, MajK. In 2013 he returned to the runway on Project Runway All Stars, an elder statesman among a new generation of designers.

Mychael Knight died on the seventeenth of October 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of thirty-nine, after years of quietly enduring intestinal illness. A gifted Black American designer who dressed his work in dignity and met his public with grace, he is honored here for the beauty he made and the generosity with which he carried himself.