Up until Jon Haggins’ unexpected death in mid-June, I was in communication with him about setting up an interview for my podcast, Sighs & Whispers. I wanted to speak with him about childhood in Florida and Brooklyn, being a fashion rising star in the late 1960s and early 70s—part of the first wave of Black fashion designers to make a splash in the mainstream—and his endless reinventions (cabaret singing, acting in soap operas, a return to fashion, leading tour groups, writing travel books, and hosting a travel show.) For years, we were friends on social media—I knew that every morning I could open up Facebook to a new post from Jon, regaling everyone with tales from the greatest new soul food restaurant or his latest travels. Endlessly curious, Jon seemed to move through the world with delight—always interested, forever engaged. On June 15th, he passed away suddenly at age 79.
Penelope Green’s obituary in the New York Times lays out the broad strokes of his peripatetic life, while his 2022 self-published memoir, Just Being Jon (which I read in preparation for the interview that never came to pass; it is available for free with Kindle Unlimited) delves deeply into all his evolutions against the backdrop of seven generations of his family, post-slavery. Below I explore his fashion career in greater detail.
According to a 1968 interview, Jon knew from a young age that he was interested in art and design, leading him to attend the High School of Needle Trades (now High School of Fashion Industries.) After graduation, he transferred two blocks up to the Fashion Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1964. “I had the usual round of various jobs, but friends kept saying I should go on my own, especially the models I went out with. We would go to discotheques, and between dances, they would urge me to set up my own business,” he told the Courier-Post in 1968. With the help of some money from his mother and friends, he established his own company in 1966; after running up a few dresses, he took them to a magazine editor who immediately called Bendel’s legendary fashion director Geraldine Stutz. She picked up his line as did Bonwit Teller’s S’fari Room and Bloomingdale’s, quickly garnering him attention for the softness of his designs, “flowing, subtly revealing the body beneath… or clinging, cut away, in sudden shocking nudity…”
Those model friends and the discotheques they populated were his inspiration—making clothes that showed the body off to best effect while in motion and that didn’t inhibit movement or require constricting undergarments. These were clothes for fit, lean, modern bodies. Working first out of his one-room apartment and then a small studio with one assistant, he might make a sample in the morning that would be tested out on the dancefloor that night. The softness of his designs and his extensive use of knit fabrics lent his talents not just to partywear; soon he had contracts with manufacturers of loungewear and sleepwear. With customers like Eartha Kitt and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, a successful main collection and side projects, and high praise in the press, at 24 Jon’s career was flying.
What’s so remarkable about Jon’s early success was that he was the first Black designer to do so. Arthur McGee was the first Black designer to be carried by the main department stores, but he wasn’t feted by the media the same way that Haggins was. A true case of being in the right place at the right time, Jon appeared on the fashion scene just after the Civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revealed quite how segregated and racist the United States was. Discrimination was seen throughout the fashion industry in the lack of opportunities available to Black designers, models, photographers, etc. With Haggins, the fashion industry made its first step toward righting some of those wrongs—and with him came first his Black model friends, who soon found themselves highly sought after, and then the rest of that generation of Black designers, including Stephen Burrows and Scott Barrie. Haggins was clear that he did not want to be defined as a “Negro designer”; he told the New York Times, “Just because I’ve done the clothes doesn’t mean only Negroes should wear them.”
It was not only his race that made Haggins a case of “right place, right time”—his fashion vision (unstructured soft clothes) was incredibly prescient. He provided a needed antidote to the fashionable, stiff garments created by the likes of Courrèges and Cardin, or the highly constructed skirt suits and dresses worn by older generations. Youthful and comfortable, many of Haggins’ designs were also unisex; one WWD photo story showed him and a female model in the same elasticized waist pants. Haggins tapped into a latent desire for sexy, easy clothes and a new unconstrained mode of living. Unsurprisingly, other designers and manufacturers quickly followed him. In 1968 he told the Baltimore Sun, “My thing really is the contemporary look, something you can wear five years from now. Everyone’s started doing what we began two and a half years ago—soft, unconstructed clothes…”
“Jon completely understands life today, the look and what it takes to make the look function.” – WWD, 1969
Everything about Jon was modern and new. He showed his collections in nightclubs using all Black models. His designs plunged lower in the front and back than any designer’s before—one “derrière décolletage” maillot on the cover of Cosmopolitan caused a scandal on the newsstands. He almost exclusively used new synthetic fabrics, technological marvels that were noted for their ease of care—perfect for the jet-set lifestyle he espoused and that his clients lived. The only jeweler he worked with on his collections was Bill Smith, soon to become the first black recipient of a Coty Award. He dressed not in the accepted uniform of a male fashion designer—a suit—but in jeans, short shorts, and t-shirts. Once he started to make men’s clothes, they were shown alongside his women’s collection. At one show at the discotheque The Sanctuary Club—located in a former church in Hell’s Kitchen and often considered the “first nightclub”—a male model rode a bike down the aisle. Commenting on the contrast between the barely clad models and the church surroundings, Bill Cunningham wrote, “Those over 30 in the audience reacted as tho at a funeral, while those under 30 were regaled with amusement at the juxtaposition. It was a groovy scene.” All of Haggins’ life and work was a very groovy scene—he even married a model at one of his shows (more on that in the next newsletter.)
In 1970, he launched a diffusion line: Jon Haggins for Bymini, named after Minnie Turner, “my right hand for the last three-and-a-half years.” According to Jon, he “wanted to do my look at a less expensive price. So instead of buying one dress in a lifetime, a woman can have zillions.” Described as “less daring… more practical and saleable,” prices ran between $40 and $100 per garment. “His new creations are clothes that mold and cling, but are soft and floaty too. Bodices fit like a second skin, waists are defined, sleeves are often snug and skinny. Then he puts everything in motion: he uses a ruffle, a peplum, a flounce and a flowing sweep of the softest Enkalure nylon to get across his own message.” Even the more conservative Bymini pieces—higher necks, long skirts and sleeves—revealed everything due to the clinginess of the fabric. Jon’s designs were made for one type of woman—it didn’t matter to him whether she was Black or white, just that she was thin and in shape; he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970, “I realize that I am specialized. My clothes only fit a certain woman. I think every woman should dress to her proportions.” He supposedly dragged “anyone on any street at any time out to see the sad state of the American body.”
Limiting his market to only very fit women and his refusal to make many pieces that could be worn by other bodies (beyond a few fringed ponchos) necessarily restricted his company’s revenue. Combined with his poor business sense and lack of a good business partner, all these elements resulted in a poor financial situation. Haggins did not pay taxes for 1970, causing a restricted capital situation and the closure of the company in October 1971. At the time, Haggins said that the problem was going to be resolved expeditiously but that he was still planning to find another job; Jon Haggins Ltd. was said to have no substantial growth potential “because it’s operating on a limited capital basis. The only way I’ll grow is to get involved in something productive.” By this point, the various design consulting projects he had with sleep and loungewear companies had all ended, seemingly due to his inability to work under others—a problem that was repeated when he took a job as chief designer for Portfolio and to do a loungewear collection for Stella Fagen and nightwear for Barad. In 1972, he founded another Bymini-esque diffusion line, Impressions, that he designed alongside his revitalized main line. All of these projects were short-lived—he was at Portfolio for four months, the other projects at most a year. Haggins continually cycled through jobs—joining companies as designer and leaving after a season. He was head designer at Nancy Valentine from July to October 1973, when he left to join Abe Schrader—that lasted only a few weeks. As he later revealed in 1980, “I don’t enjoy working for other people. One of the most important things to me is creative freedom. When I work for someone else, I feel stifled and restricted.”
Defeated by the industry, the lack of capital to run his own business, chafing at authority, and newly divorced, Haggins left fashion and became a cabaret singer. Though he made a living singing at nightclubs, he wasn’t done with fashion yet—he took on any small projects that came his way but was decidedly bitter about the way he had been treated and the direction fashion had gone. Talking in 1974, Haggins said, “All the theatricality is finished. In a way, fashion has defeated itself. Glamour used to be the fun ingredient of living. Doing the slightly daring, wearing the offbeat, trying the ostentatious thing was considered funky. Now a fashion show that turned out to be bona fide marriage ceremony would probably be laughed at.” He felt that his career had failed due to his desire to create something new: “Inspiration is dead—but fashion is still alive… All this dreadful business of nostalgia is ruining fashion. Who wants to dress like a caricature of yesterday?... I wanted to create interesting clothes that were neither ‘40s leftovers nor dumb two-seam shifts. Nobody had room for a middle-of-the-road fashion attitude.” A t-shirt company called Teeze was a brief bright spot in the mid-70s.
In 1977, he took a job with Leslie J. that appears to have lasted less than a year. Two years later, Haggins opened an evening dress company under his name. It was relaunched the following year with new backing—Haggins had presented some of his designs at the 1980 Harvey’s Bristol Cream Tribute to Black Designers where they drew the attention of the owners of a travel firm, the Cortell Group, who decided to invest. The clothes, when they made it to the runway and production, were still great for travel and parties—what he called “nonseasonal investment clothing.” Though Haggins claimed an increasing conservatism in his designs, the collections still featured plenty of plunging necklines, clinging silhouettes, and sexy body-conscious garments.
Haggins left the Cortell Group after one year, starting a small eveningwear studio under his own name; synthetic ballgowns and cocktail dresses with deep-V necklines and swathes of ruffles predominated for the next few years. When his designs were featured for a sixth time on the cover of Cosmopolitan, Studio 54 honored him with a party for over 2,000 people that included a fashion show and a singing performance by Jon. Cosmopolitan was by far his greatest support throughout his career; Haggins was a favorite designer of Helen Gurley Brown and she made sure to include his designs in the magazine, through every up and down. In late 1988, Jon closed his eveningwear line; after around 1990, he appears to have stopped designing completely and turned his attention to his other great passion—travel.
My next newsletter will be on his fashion wedding, while the following will look at his homes.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jon in February this year -I never expected him to respond to my LinkedIn message - or call! He was delightful. We were to speak again after his trip to Greece, and I know why he couldn't make that appointment. Sincere condolences to the family.