Designers is the profile archive of AWH Magazine: reported pieces made from studio visits, interviews and the collaborators who work alongside a designer. Subjects range from first collections to houses changing hands. Useful for readers who want to know how a garment was arrived at, not only who signed it.
The Tunisian-born couturier built body-moulding clothes from knit and leather on his own schedule, ran his house from a rue de Moussy atelier, and showed only when the work was finished.
The Austrian-born American designer made his name with the 1964 monokini and his argument with unisex, knit and futurism — a body of provocation that turned out to be a working forecast.
A Chelsea boutique opened in 1955 turned youth clothing into an industry, and the Victoria and Albert Museum's 2019 retrospective credited Mary Quant with designing the sixties as most people actually wore it.
The Anglo-American couturier treated the evening gown as a structural problem in weight, spiral and support, an obsession the Metropolitan Museum of Art staged as Beyond Fashion in 2014.
A basque couturier who opened his Paris house in 1937 built clothes the way engineers build bridges, and when he closed it in 1968 he ended the most rigorous couture of the century.