Fashion Designers: J

The fashion designer directory in this section is set up in alphabetical order, and the designers are listed by their first name. On this page you will find designers whose first name starts with the letter J — a letter that runs from a Paris couturier of the 1910s to the shoemaker who redrew the stiletto, by way of fashion's most theatrical showman. Use the directory list directly below to reach each designer's guide pages.

This section does not contain every fashion designer in the world. The designers here are some of the more famous ones, selected because they are believed to be the developers of famous brands; other clothing designers may be better, but these are the names this letter of the directory follows. Additional designers can be found in the Designer Directory, linked in the references.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

The J Designers at a Glance

Jean Patou (1887–1936) founded his Paris house before the First World War and became a pioneer of sportswear and the designer of Joy, for years billed as the costliest perfume in the world. Jean-Paul Gaultier (born 1952), Paris's enfant terrible, built his name on Breton stripes, corsetry worn as outerwear and the cone bra he made for Madonna, directed Hermès from 2003 to 2010, and is the subject of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition pages in this guide. Jimmy Choo (born 1948), the Malaysian-born, London-based shoemaker, co-founded the Jimmy Choo label in 1996 and made the stiletto a red-carpet standard.

Jil Sander (born 1943), the German designer, founded her label in Hamburg and became the defining minimalist of the 1990s — pure line, luxury fabric, no decoration. John Galliano (born 1960), born in Gibraltar and raised in London, ran Givenchy and then Dior from 1996 to 2011 with the most theatrical couture shows of his era, and later directed Maison Margiela. Judith Leiber (1921–2018), the Hungarian-born American designer, built her name on jewelled minaudière handbags carried at inaugurations and on red carpets. Each is linked from the directory list at the top of this page.

How This Directory Works

Listing designers by first name is this directory's standing convention, and the J letter shows both its logic and its accidents: two Jeans — Patou and Gaultier, a generation of Paris couture apart — file side by side, while houses better known by surname (Choo, Sander, Leiber) are reached here through the Christian names their founders answered to. Readers looking for a house rather than a person should follow the directory list links, which lead to each designer's own pages regardless of the name they searched by.

Every letter of the alphabet has a list page like this one, linked in the directory list and in the references below, so the full directory can be browsed letter by letter. For the complete designer directory — including designers filed under other conventions — the Designer Directory and the designers-by-name index are linked in the references as well.