The Council of Fashion Designers of America was founded by Eleanor Lambert in 1962, with the goal of bringing designers out of the back rooms of Seventh Avenue and into the spotlight. The mission was to help put American fashion on the map.
Lambert, who hailed from Crawfordsville, Ind., studied sculpture and did fashion sketching and reporting, which led her to New York and a career that included roles such as press director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and director of the New York press. Clothing Institute.
In 1942, Lambert presided over the first Designers’ Press Week, a suggested time for the completion of collections so that designers could cater to a target group of buyers from across the US, and the first Coty Awards, a precursor of the CFDA Awards. By the 1960s, more than 200 buyers were attending the seasonal collections in New York, which began to rival the level of attendance at the Paris shows. Designers like Bill Blass and Geoffrey Beene had emerged from the backrooms, but there was still a widespread sense that Seventh Avenue was controlled by businessmen and manufacturers, who dominated industry trade groups and the union agenda.
At the time, Sens. Claiborne Pell and Jacob Javits had approached Lambert about participating in their development of a National Arts Council that would promote painting, music, dance and fashion in the US, but for fashion to be considered an acceptable form of American Art, they required the incorporation of a non-profit organization, rather than a commercial industry or business.
Lambert assembled a group of designers—including Blass, Norman Norell, Jane Derby, Luis Estevez, Rudi Gernreich, Donald Brooks, Arnold Scaasi, Sydney Wragge, and Ben Zuckerman—to form the CFDA. According to its charter, which was filed on December 6, 1962, its mission was to “further advance the position of fashion design as a recognized branch of American art and culture” and “advance its artistic and professional standards.” Within a month, other designers joined him.
“All I did was start it,” Lambert recalled during an interview with WWD in 2000. “I’ve always said that bringing people together as a community furthers their identity as a whole. We were a group of people with qualifications equal and like-minded to move forward. There’s a difference between business people and artists. I was representing a coat manufacturer at the time who was upset that he wasn’t included in one of our meetings, and I asked him, ‘Well , do you have a designer? I’ve never met him,” to which he replied: “He’s in the back room. That’s where he’s got to be right?'”
The change in perception was almost immediate. The largest trade group before the CFDA was the New York Couture Group, and it only recognized manufacturers as members. Many of them were content with the practice of traveling to Paris each season to buy designer dresses to make line-by-line copies, but Lambert convinced a large contingent to break away to join the CFDA.
“The main thing was to get away from creative designers, and ‘creative’ was a very important word at the time,” Arnold Scaasi once recalled. “When she did that, it really took off.”
Lambert was instrumental in organizing American fashion events around the world, including the 1973 “Battle of Versailles” fashion show that put American talent on the global fashion radar. Bill BlassOscar de la Renta, Halston, Stephen Burrows and Anne Klein showed for America, while Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Emanuel Ungaro and Marc Bohan of Christian Dior showed for Paris.
Lambert received the CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988 and the CFDA Industry Tribute Award in 1993. She died in 2003 at the age of 100.
Today, the CFDA has grown significantly and counts more than 500 of America’s leading womenswear, menswear and accessories designers as members.
In addition to hosting the annual CFDA Awards, which recognize the industry’s top talent, the organization owns the Fashion Calendar and organizes New York Fashion Week: for Men. of The CFDA offers programs that support professional development and scholarships, including the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the Geoffrey Been Design Scholarship Award, and the Liz Claiborne Design Scholarship Award.
In 2013, the Fashion Manufacturing Initiative was created to nurture, elevate and preserve apparel manufacturing in New York City. Member support is provided through the Strategic Partnerships Group, a high-profile group of companies that provide designers with strategic opportunities.
CFDA Foundation Inc. is a special non-profit organization organized to mobilize membership to raise funds for charitable purposes. Through the foundation, the CFDA created and manages the worldwide initiative Fashion Targets Breast Cancer, raises funds for HIV and AIDS organizations with events such as the previous Fashion Night and the Seventh Sale, and addresses the issue of model health with the CFDA Health Initiative .
