Jon Haggins, Designer Who Slipped Into and Out of Fashion, Dies at 79
He was a member of a cohort of Black designers celebrated in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But struggles with financing led to several changes in direction.
Jon Haggins, a fashion designer and bon vivant who found fame in the late 1960s and early ’70s with his sinuous, sensuous designs, but who struggled with financing and shuttered and reopened his business and reinvented himself several times, most recently as the host of a travel show on cable television, died on June 15 at his home in Queens. He was 79.
The former broadcast journalist Chee Chee Williams, a friend, confirmed the death but said the cause was not known. Mr. Haggins had been on vacation in Greece with Ms. Williams and others in late May when he fell and broke a hip.
The late 1960s were a pivot point for Black designers. Mr. Haggins was among a cohort that included Willi Smith, Scott Barrie and Stephen Burrows, all of whom were being celebrated by fashion magazines and courted by department stores. They would all go on to make history, Women’s Wear Daily reported Mr. Haggins as saying years later, by “doing our own thing and making our fashion statements while the Black revolution was happening across America.”
Mr. Haggins designed slinky matte jersey and chiffon numbers with plunging necklines and backs, often in geometric patterns and largely free of buttons or zippers. They were sexy and revealing, which made him a favorite of Helen Gurley Brown, the sassy, sex-positive editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, who often put his designs on her covers. A backless white bathing suit of his, worn by the model Petra on the cover of the August 1970 issue, caused a stir for its “derrière décolletage,” as Mr. Haggins put it.
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“The styles are meant for young, firm bodies that don’t have a thing to hide,” Bernadine Morris wrote in The New York Times in a review of Mr. Haggins’s show at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan 1970, when models like Naomi Sims, whose first job was with Mr. Haggins, and Norma Jean Darden danced around the theater’s red plush lounge.
At the time, his clothes were seemingly everywhere — in boutiques at Henri Bendel, Bonwit Teller, B. Altman and Bloomingdale's, and in the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country and Look. Celebrities like Raquel Welch, Diahann Caroll, Farrah Fawcett and Diana Ross wore his clothes. Ms. Brown was a regular customer. On a panel with his fellow designers Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta, when Mr. Haggins was receiving an award, the group was asked by the moderator, “What do you think women should look for in the 1970s?”
“The woman of the 1970s,” Mr. Haggins declared, with typical brashness, “should look for my label.”
He was confident, talented and preternaturally energetic. But he was no businessman, and he soon owed back taxes, among other debts. The bank refused to extend him more credit, so he closed his business in 1972.
“I had hit the downside of fashion, a bumpy road that a lot of new designers meet — insufficient capital,” he wrote in a memoir, “Just Being Jon,” which he published himself last year.
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And he chafed at authority, which made working for others difficult. In the 1970s and ’80s, he worked at Leslie Fay and other companies. It never went well. He would also relaunch his business several times, always to great acclaim, and then shutter it again, having fallen out with a backer — and finally, in the mid-’80s, succumbing to the punishing exigencies of the garment industry, which grew ever more complex.
Between and after his fashion adventures, Mr. Haggins would reinvent himself in different roles, over and over again and with enormous enthusiasm and brio. He was a cabaret singer, a soap opera actor, a television pitchman, a travel tour guide, a journalist and, finally, the host of “GlobeTrotter TV,” a travel show on public-access cable television in New York.
John Wesley Hagins Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1943, in Tampa, Fla. When his father joined the Army during World War II, his surname was misspelled with an extra “G,” so his mother, Willie Mae (Walker) Hagins, changed the family name to match, worried that if anything happened to her husband, she and her son wouldn’t receive veterans’ benefits. (Young John would drop the “h” from his first name sometime in the 1960s.)
But the couple separated when John Sr. returned from the war. Willie Mae left Florida to look for better employment opportunities in New York, and Jon was raised in Sanford, Fla., near Orlando, by his grandfather, a carpenter, until he was 10. In 1953, Jon and his sister, Carolyn, who had been living with a foster family, joined Willie Mae, and the family moved to Coney Island.
Jon had a talent for drawing and a love of fashion, and a guidance counselor suggested that he attend the High School of Fashion Industries, a public high school in Manhattan. After graduating, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, a part of the State University of New York, which was a few blocks away. He graduated in 1964.
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He had some 20 jobs in his first two years out of college, first as a pattern maker and then at a blouse company. “Blacks were the largely invisible members of the back-room staff in fashion houses during the 1960s,” he wrote in his memoir, and Mr. Haggins was not the back-room sort. “Getting hired and fired,” he added, “came easily to me.”
He began to frequent the celebrity-strewn nightclub Arthur, run by Sybil Burton, the ex-wife of Richard Burton, on East 54th Street. He dressed his regular date, a model and high school buddy named Myrna Stephens, in his own designs, a different dress every night, from which he began to create a collection.
In 1966, when he had 12 pieces, he cold-called editors at fashion magazines and at Women’s Wear Daily, which was the first publication to cover him. The editor who came to see him told her colleagues, he recalled, that she had just discovered “a tall, ebony young man with the most inspirational fashions.”
Mr. Haggins’s romantic partners were mostly men, but not always. He and June Murphy, a model, met in 1970 and decided to marry. That September he turned his show of resort and spring fashions, held on the terrace of an apartment in Tudor City, into their wedding.
It used to be a convention of fashion to end a show with a model dressed as a bride. Mr. Haggins dressed his bride in a purple print with a trailing purple scarf painted with a butterfly, which wrapped around the two of them as they took their vows. But the marriage lasted just a year and a half. He was, by his own admission, chronically unfaithful, and the divorce was bitter. Their marriage “was a very special time in my life,” he told The Times in 2017, “and I wish it had lasted.”
His frothy chiffon and jersey confections often took flight. At a show at F.I.T., his alma mater, in 1979, when he and other Black designers were being honored, one of his dresses flew up and over a model’s head, drawing a standing ovation from the audience. When Ms. Williams, the former journalist, married in 1980, Mr. Haggins designed the bridesmaids’ gowns: tea-length chiffon in shades of pink that were slit to the waist. The wedding was held one blustery evening at the Wave Hill public garden in the Bronx, and during the processional a gust lifted the bridesmaids’ skirts like so many sails. The minister, Ms. Williams recalled, declared, “Thank you, Jesus!”
Mr. Haggins is survived by his sister, Carolyn Grant.
Mr. Haggins was a man of grand gestures. During the blackout of 1965, he walked from his apartment to a nearby steakhouse carrying a candelabra he’d pinched from the Plaza Hotel, tapers ablaze, and ordered a steak, medium-rare.
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