Stephen Burrows

Stephen Gerald Burrows was born on the fifteenth of September 1943 in Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Octavia Pennington, was African-American, and his father, Gerald Burrows, was of Trinidadian-American heritage. Raised chiefly by his mother and his grandmother, Beatrice Simmons — herself a garment-trade sample hand — young Stephen was set before a zig-zag sewing machine as a child and taught the craft that would carry his name across the world.

He studied first at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and then at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, from which he graduated in 1966. Working in fluid matte jersey, he became famous for radiant color-blocking and the fluttering "lettuce hem" — a curled edge born of a happy accident that became his signature. His clothes were made to move, cut for the freedom and joy of the body in motion.

In 1970, Henri Bendel president Geraldine Stutz gave him his own in-store boutique, "Stephen Burrows' World," a landmark for a Black American designer. In 1973 he became the first Black designer to win a Coty Award — winning again in 1974 and 1977 — and stood among the five Americans at the celebrated Battle of Versailles, where his work helped the American team astonish the Paris establishment.

Living still, honored anew at FIT in December 2023 on the fiftieth anniversary of Versailles, Stephen Burrows endures as a founding master of American sportswear. May the color and joy he stitched into cloth be remembered as long as fabric moves.