Diane von Furstenberg

I don't think there's a cleaner example anywhere in this decade of one garment making one designer's career, permanently, than Diane von Furstenberg and the wrap dress. She launched it in 1974, and within a couple of years the story around it wasn't really about fashion anymore - it was about a company reportedly moving on the order of a million dresses, and a designer's name becoming shorthand for a specific, easy kind of confidence.

Von Furstenberg, a Belgian-born princess by marriage who'd relocated to New York, had already been building a small knitwear business through the early 70s before the wrap dress itself arrived - printed jersey tops and dresses sold directly to department stores, which is worth noting because it meant she already understood mass-market manufacturing before her signature piece even existed, rather than backing into it afterward. The wrap dress entry covers the construction itself in detail, but the short version is that it solved a real problem: one dress, no zipper, no buttons, a self-tie belt, printed jersey that skimmed rather than clung, and a fit that adjusted itself to a wide range of body types without alteration. She put it on the cover of Newsweek in 1976 - "the season's biggest sensation" - and by that point the wrap silhouette it defined had genuinely entered the mainstream vocabulary of American dressing.

The line I keep coming back to is hers: "feel like a woman, wear a dress." It sounds almost throwaway now, but set against a decade where more women were entering white-collar workplaces and needing clothes that could plausibly go from a desk to dinner without a wardrobe change, it was a real answer to a real question, not just a slogan. And I think that's the actual case for her importance beyond the sales numbers - most of the decade's most famous design moments came out of Paris ateliers or downtown New York's disco-adjacent scene, and von Furstenberg instead built a genuinely mass, genuinely woman-owned ready-to-wear business on a single well-solved garment. That's a different kind of achievement than a runway moment, and it's arguably the more durable one - the wrap dress never really left.