Zelda Wynn Valdes

Zelda Christian Barbour was born on the twenty-eighth of June 1905 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, the eldest of seven children of James W. Barbour, a cook on the Pennsylvania railroad, and Blanche M. Barbour, who kept the family home. As a girl she learned the needle at the side of her grandmother's seamstress, and that early apprenticeship in cloth and thread would shape the whole of her long life.

She came into her craft in New York, first assisting an uncle in his White Plains tailoring shop, then opening her own dressmaking business in 1935. In 1948 she opened her studio on Broadway in Washington Heights, widely honored as the first Black-owned business on that avenue, later moving her salon, Chez Zelda, to West 57th Street. There she dressed a generation of luminaries — Ella Fitzgerald, Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker — mastering a tailoring that celebrated rather than concealed the female form.

In 1960 she designed the original Playboy Bunny costume for Hugh Hefner's clubs, a garment whose fame long outran the credit given its maker. Yet her deepest legacy came in 1970, when Arthur Mitchell invited her to costume the newly founded Dance Theatre of Harlem. She dressed some eighty-two productions across more than twenty countries, and it was she who set aside the traditional pink tights so dancers might wear hues matched to their own skin.

She closed her fashion house in 1989 but stayed with the company, stitching and shaping until her death on the twenty-sixth of September 2001, at ninety-six. May the hands that clothed queens of the stage, and taught the ballet to honor every shade of skin, be remembered with the dignity they gave to others.