Stephen Burrows, the CFDA’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Winner, in the Words of 7 of His Closest Collaborators

One of the five designers who represented American fashion at the 1973 Battle of Versailles, Stephen Burrows’s work is defined by color, joy, movement, inventiveness, and togetherness. His designs are as emblematic of the 1970s as that of his friend Halston, but less known. “He’s a quiet, beautiful storm,” says Bethann Hardison about her friend, who is this year’s recipient of the CFDA’s Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award.

Burrows’s focus has always been on his work, not fame. Born in 1943 in Newark, New Jersey, he was raised by his grandmother who taught him how to sew. After studying at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and FIT, in 1966 Burrows went to work on Seventh Avenue. Two years later he was designing for O Boutique, which the Daily Mirror dubbed, “New York’s hottest and newest fashion boutique” at the time. Everyone involved was friends, and with one exception, they were all under 25 and working and playing hard.

Henri Bendel played an important role in Burrows’s career. From 1970 to 1973 you could find the designer at his own shop at the iconic department store, called Stephen Burrows’ World. While there he staged shows on the street and in-store with models prancing down the runway in his top-stitched and colorblocked pieces, and the fluid Jasco jersey pieces that were one of his trademarks.

“I use knits because they suggest skin and its flexibility,” Burrows told the AP in 1972. He similarly bent metal mesh to his will, so that it looked liquid on the body. On the heels of his crowd-rousing performance at Versailles, Burrows, the sole Black designer to participate, won his first Coty Award in 1974 (he joined their hall of fame three years later), and Max Factor released the Stevie B fragrance (the designer appeared in the ads) in 1976. From the ’80s into the ’00s he worked independently, and sometimes in concert with Henri Bendel, which reopened his Stephen Burrows World shop in 2002. He was the subject of a monographic exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, “Stephen Burrows: When Fashion Danced,” in 2013. To celebrate his CFDA Award, seven of his friends and close collaborators shared their memories of Stephen Burrows.

Pat Cleveland

Stephen created clothes that you could dance in: lightweight matte jersey wrap dresses in whimsical rainbow colors. My favorite dresses are the matte jerseys for evening with long trains, a fox tail shawl, and fringed leather pants and dresses. Stephen has taken me on so many exciting adventures doing photos [starting from] the very first time I met him, in 1978 at the top floor of Henri Bendel’s where he had his design studio and cutting rooms. He and his friends were all dressed in Stephen’s designs and we walked over from Bendel’s to Central Park and I’ll never forget it because I had never seen so many beautiful young people dressed so well and so colorfully. Stephen has inspired so many designers with his talent and authentic soul, he is much loved.

Karen Bjornsen Macdonald

I first met Stephen in the early 1970s in New York. Halston introduced us and most likely encouraged Stephen to book me for his shows. I love his clothes. They are unlike anyone else’s. His use of fabrics, his lettuce edges and combinations of colors are modern and unique to his designs. He is a true designer of clothes for men and women. Stephen’s dresses fit and move with your body—they are both feminine and bold. I remember wearing a blue seersucker striped dress he designed while I was working with Antonio Lopez in Italy; it was long, with a halter neckline and a deep V in front. It is impossible to choose a favorite garment of his, but that dress might just be it for me. In 2003 Stephen had a ready-to-wear runway show in downtown Manhattan. My younger daughter was a senior in high school, and he invited us both to walk in the show; it was a very special memory to share before she left for college, made all the better by Stephen’s warmth and beautiful designs.

Nancy North

Stephen makes unique colorful fashion. I don’t remember [him giving us] any instructions [at his shows], just Stephen saying, ‘Oooh I love it, Miss Nancy.’ (Everyone was a Miss: Like Miss Alva or Miss Cleveland.) I always felt like we were a bunch of kids rooting for one another. It was a wonderful feeling of belonging!

Alva Chinn

My first time walking for Stephen was when he was at Henri Bendel and he had a show on 57th Street. I was so nervous and walking so fast that the only pictures that were in focus of me by Bill Cunningham were when I was going back to change. I was so nervous. But Stephen was very encouraging. I remember at Versailles, he was in the back sewing. I remember that. That vision stays with me, that and Ramona Saunders putting the quill in her hair and [Stephen’s good friend, the photographer] Charles Tracy running back saying, ‘Oh, vous êtes!’ ‘This is it.’ ‘Vous êtes, vous êtes!’ they used to say.

One of the things about him that I appreciated is his true joy in doing the work. Stephen really was quite a dancer. I don’t know that he would call himself a mambo king, but he certainly loved to dance and he could do that Latin thing so well that he thought everybody could. And I remember him turning me [around and around] and saying, ‘Of course you can do this….’ I felt like a top that was spinning out of control half the time.

He liked movement, and that seemed so clear to me in the way his clothes were. First of all, you couldn’t wear anything under them. His liking the female form, whether it was thinner or curvier, was not the norm. [His] girls had very different bodies, I would say most of us were not ‘perfect’; we were imperfectly perfect for Stephen. I think he saw each of us very differently, and I love that.

I guess I was blessed to work at a specific time where I got to understand that what I did was of meaning to the people who were creating the clothes. It’s the connection that made the difference to me at the time. It was about respecting and loving what you do and doing that with other people who respected and loved what you brought to their clothes.

Bethann Hardison

Stephen is an inventor visionaire; he created things that had never been done before, [such as] the underwear stitching that he decided to use as decoration on the outside… and the red criss-cross stitching. The lettucing was completely different; that was only done on rayon matte jersey. And he went to Whiting Davis where they made metal mesh for bags and [said] he’d like to use it to make clothing out of. So he made the dress, those things were copied and have been copied for the rest of time. No one had ever done that before.

At Versailles his segment was very well received; Anne Klein went first, Stephen second. The programs went up in the air when I came down, because it was a fierce moment, and they started to scream, ‘Bravo, bravo, bravo.’ It was a canary yellow dress (we all had trains) and when I got to the end, I threw the train down, and I stared with such ferocity because you got tired of being told that [the Americans were] not going to win… At the end of the day, Stephen’s segment was very well received… Yves Saint Laurent told Women’s Wear Daily that Stephen Burrows was the only true American designer who impressed him.

Norma Jean Darden

When I first met Stephen, he had a loft down the Lower East Side; he had a loft and it was a tribe of people who lived together, worked together, and played together—and they did all three very hard! There was Donald [a model]; Bobby Breslau, he did wonderful work with leather accessories; and there was [fabric designer] Hector Torres. Everybody did something different that added to the look, and when they went out together, it was so striking. When the tribe hit the dance floor, all eyes went to them because of the whirling, the lettuce stitching, and the layered colors. They were just ahead of everywhere they went. I told you about going to Alabama, wearing his clothes in a tiny little town, and people asking me where I came from. It was like I had come from another planet. And in London they had clubs you couldn’t get into, but when we showed up wearing Stephen’s clothing, they came out to greet us. [His work] really represented the era of dancing movement, the beat as a commune idea.

We loved working for Stephen. [One season] he had the idea to make this look where we would have no eyebrows, just big eyes and colorful cheeks and lips, and so everybody shaved their eyebrows off. In my case, they didn’t grow back—everybody else’s did—it gave me an addiction to an eyebrow pencil!

Anna Cleveland

“His designs give freedom of movement!” enthuses Anna Cleveland, who, like her mother, is a muse to the designer. “Every moment I have spent with Uncle Stephen has been fun,” notes the model who calls out his “little t-shirts with block colors and skating skirts for summer holidays” as being easy to pack. When asked how Burrows instructed her to move in his clothes, she replied: “Just be yourself and have fun.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.