Episode 49: Hylan Booker
If you are interested in fashion, design, and cultural history, please check out my Substack newsletter, also called Sighs and Whispers, which covers many of the same themes as this podcast. You should sign up! All financial support for the newsletter allows me the time to write it, produce this podcast, and manage my Instagram, so please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Hylan Booker measuring Ossie Clark’s waist at the Royal College of Art, 18th June 1965. Photo by Terry Disney/Express/Getty Images.
The first designer I became truly obsessed with was Ossie Clark. I voraciously read everything I could find about him, following every rabbit hole that led to any friend or associate mentioned in any book or article about him. One of the names often mentioned alongside him in early articles was Hylan Booker, an African American fashion designer who studied at the Royal College of Art in London alongside Ossie in the early to mid-1960s. I was always intrigued by his story—how did a Black Detroiter end up in London, studying fashion in the 1960s?—so I set out to speak to him.
Now living in Los Angeles, Booker has had a long and very varied career, working in many sectors of the fashion industry before starting anew in art. Born and raised in Detroit, Hylan Booker studied art in high school, briefly working in window displays at the department store Franklin Simon, before joining the US Air Force and getting stationed in the UK in 1958. In his downtime, he studied at the Swindon School of Art before enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London, where he studied alongside Ossie Clark. Booker launched his own line after graduation in 1966; working out of his small garret atelier, he did everything himself: design, cut, sew, sell, and deliver. It quickly became one of the most talked-about collections in Swinging London. Favoring elegant, sculptured wool dresses and coats, Booker was trying to move fashion forward from the hip Carnaby Street look. As he explained to a journalist, “The kooky had a job to do. It started a whole new feeling… Now people want more quality. Me? I’m a realist. I like to see people in what they can live in.”
Jean Shrimpton awarding Hylan Booker the Yardley London Look Award in New York. Newsday, June 9, 1967.
In 1967, he was awarded Yardley’s London Look Award; a surprise, as Janey Ironside, the legendary professor of fashion at the RCA, wrote in her memoir, while describing her most famous students: “There was Hylan Booker, an attractive young American Negro ex-G.I. intelligent and talkative, who ironically enough won the Yardley Award IN America for the best ‘young British designer.’” Though his own line was selling to Harrods, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Henri Bendel, he closed it in early 1968 due to financial issues. A few months later, Booker became the first Black designer to helm a European couture house when he was tapped to design the couture collection for the newly revived House of Worth (other designers were hired to design hats, furs, menswear, and jewelry). His designs brought a new, fresh energy to the London couture scene.
“I LIKE CLOTHES TO HAPPEN. I like to put things together into a great everyday sort of thing. Something exciting, dramatic, you know? But the drama has to be very subtle. What I try to do is make the classic special rather than the special special.”
Booker left the House of Worth in autumn 1970, after his efforts to push the company to expand into ready-to-wear were stymied by the owner. Throughout the next decade, he freelanced for many British fashion companies, taught at Nottingham College of Art, and established a cosmetics line for women of color, called Mia, before returning to the United States in 1980. In New York, Booker began designing for men, spending much of the decade working for D.S.I. along with moonlighting for other contemporary men’s brands. He moved to Miami in the 1990s, where he established his own couture line of exquisite evening gowns—concocting the ultimate wardrobe for Palm Beach society balls. As an ad for a trunk show at venerable Palm Beach retailer Martha stated, a “connoisseur collection of romantic, opulent and distinctive evening wear, glorious ball gowns and bridal.” After closing his line in the wake of 9/11, Hylan switched his focus to art—primarily painting, as well as soaking up the beauty of art while working as a guard for LACMA, which also provided him the opportunity to start writing about art and fashion history for LACMA’s blog, Unframed.
Hylan Booker in his London atelier. Sepia, November 1973.
Here is Booker revisiting his time with Worth, in a LACMA blog post from 2011, at the time of the museum’s “Fashioning Fashion” exhibition:
Reflecting on my time with the House of Worth, the most striking thing was the time itself. The 1960s were hot and sexy, and Swinging London was the coolest place in the universe—vivacious, vivid, and vital. It feels like everything that we experience now was being born at that very moment. The spirit of women really defined this sense of liberation with a freedom not seen since the 1920s, although far more complex and assured. Here the short skirt, the tights, bobbed hair, and the pill would cut them off from the past as never before. Unknowingly, we were the future. With our own intoxicating background music of the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Kinks, Jimmy Hendrix, and so many more, a self-reflecting universe seen through Pop art was complete. It was a glorious, uniquely transient moment! And we were the agents, the vanguard, possessing a standard we were somehow expected to maintain. I was the product of the Royal College of Art, as were many of the designers and artists at the time such as David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, and the Kings Road style maker, Ossie Clark. England was bursting with artistic energy.
Hylan Booker at LACMA, while working as a guard there. Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez for the Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2011.
Hylan has always been at the center of everything—continually creating and always evolving. Still painting daily, Hylan is a highly erudite, philosophical man. We spoke for several hours, with our conversation touching on all aspects of his life and career, following the ups and downs, the inspirations, and the passions—discussing all of the career moments covered above in much greater detail, and situating them within a life of great friendship and family.
Hylan Booker for House of Worth (1968-1970):
Hylan Booker’s menswear for D.S.I. (1982-1984):
Hylan Booker’s evening wear designs (late 1990s to early 2000s):
Some of Hylan Booker’s paintings:
