Halston

Roy Halston Frowick had already made his name before this decade even started - he designed the pillbox hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore to the 1961 inauguration - but the 1970s is when "Halston" stopped being a surname and became, deliberately, a one-word brand. That's not a small detail. Dropping the first name and going fully mononymous was a genuinely new move for an American designer at the time, closer to how a pop star or an artist branded themselves than how the ready-to-wear industry usually operated, and it tells you a lot about how he understood his own celebrity.

The clothes matched the confidence. Where a lot of the decade's silhouettes were busy - prints, fringe, layering - Halston built a reputation on radical simplicity: bias-cut jersey gowns and caftans with no visible seaming fuss, cut to skim the body and move when a woman moved rather than hold a fixed shape, plus the Ultrasuede shirtdress, a single unlined, machine-washable dress in a synthetic suede alternative that became one of the era's genuine best-sellers precisely because it looked expensive and required none of the care real suede would have. That combination - visual minimalism built on real technical control of drape - is what separates his best pieces from clothes that just look plain.

He was also, famously, not separate from his own clientele - Halston was a fixture at Studio 54 alongside Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, and Elsa Peretti, dressing the same women he danced next to, which put him at the exact center of Studio 54 and disco culture rather than observing it from a design studio. I think that closeness is actually the throughline of his whole 70s output: his gowns work as disco silhouette eveningwear because he was designing for bodies he watched move on an actual dance floor, not an abstract runway idea of movement. Few designers of any decade have had that direct a feedback loop between the clothes and the room they were worn in.