Ensemble

In 1957, designer Arthur McGee became the first Black American to lead a Seventh Avenue design studio– Bobbie Brooks. Alongside contemporaries Scott Barrie, Stephen Burrows, Willi Smith, and others, McGee pioneered a period of racial diversity in New York fashion that continued through the 1980s. A Detroit native and the son of a skilled seamstress and dressmaker, McGee studied fashion at New York’s Traphagan School of Fashion and the Fashion Institute of Technology before apprenticing with American couturier Charles James. Like many emerging creatives in the 1960s, McGee launched his career in the boutique market. He opened The Store in 1965, where he sold work under his own name and developed a series of ready-to-wear lines beginning in the 1970s characterized by the simplicity and practicality of American sportswear and often activated by his longtime interest in traditional African textiles and techniques, including resist-dyed indigo and mud cloth.