Zelda Wynn Valdes was born in 1905 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Her grandmother had been enslaved; her mother ran a dressmaking business. Valdes trained with her uncle, a tailor, in White Plains, New York, and opened her own Manhattan atelier in 1948 — the first Black-owned dress shop on Broadway.

The Clientele

Her clients through the 1940s and 1950s read as the Black entertainment aristocracy of the period: Ella Fitzgerald (who wore Wynn Valdes for her 1947 Carnegie Hall debut), Josephine Baker, Dorothy Dandridge, Marian Anderson, Joyce Bryant, Mae West, Edna Robinson (wife of the boxer Sugar Ray), and Constance Bennett. Her signature silhouette was a severely fitted, corseted hourglass with a cinched waist and an almost architectural bust — the bodycon dress, twenty years before the term existed.

“

I have a talent for making women look sexy. — Zelda Wynn Valdes

The Bunny

In 1960 Hugh Hefner commissioned Wynn Valdes to design a costume for the waitresses at his first Playboy Club in Chicago. She produced: a strapless, high-cut, one-piece bodysuit in satin, with a fluffy cotton tail, rabbit ears on a headband, a bow-tie collar, and matching cuffs. The costume — with modifications — is the single most-copied corporate uniform of the twentieth century. It has been worn by approximately 25,000 women since 1960.

The Dance Theatre

In 1970 Arthur Mitchell asked her to design costumes for the new Dance Theatre of Harlem. She worked there, principally, until the end of her life, producing costumes for more than eighty of the company's ballets. She died in Manhattan in 2001, at 96.

Wynn Valdes was not meaningfully covered in the fashion press during her working lifetime. A Met Costume Institute acquisition of seven of her pieces in 2019, and the Brooklyn Museum's 2024 exhibition Africa Fashion, which included her work, have initiated the reversal of that silence.