Loris Azzaro (9 February 1933 – 20 November 2003) was a French fashion designer. He was born in Tunisia from Sicilian parents and came to Paris to set up his cloth and perfume lines in 1962. By 1968 his business was a huge success. He was well known for making glamorous party dresses for the elite of French society. Often his creations featured ornate beading and daring cut outs. He was also known to use brightly colored chains woven onto shirts to make intricate chainmail dresses and tops. Over the course of his long career he dressed numerous celebrities including Dalida, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Marisa Berenson, Claudia Cardinale, Isabelle Adjani, Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman.

A French fashion designer. Known for sophistication and elegance. He once said that "dressmaking is the architecture of movement." Balmain also created perfumes, including Vent Vert (1947), his first successful scent and one of the best-selling perfumes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jolie Madame (1953), Ivoire (1979), and Eau d'Amazonie (2006). His first perfume, launched in 1947, bore his company's Phone Number, Elysées 64-83. Balmain was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design for Happy New Year (1980). Additional Broadway theatre credits include costumes for Sophia Loren in The Millionairess (1960) and Josephine Baker for her eponymous 1964 revue. He also was a costume designer for 16 films, including the Brigitte Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and designed on-screen wardrobes for the actresses Vivien Leigh and Mae West. He made a lot of dresses for Dalida.

Averardo Bessi can be consider the classic example of a "self made man". He started as an apprentice tailor and made quick progress, receiving praise and appreciation for his work not only in Italy but all over the world. In 1959 his production, until then targeted at a selected local clientelle, began to be exported to the United States of America. From 1966 the collection was enriched by printed fabrics with his original designs and still today the firm, that has seen the entry of the third generation personally produces its own designs also taking care of the styling aspect.

Biba was the most glorious fashion retailer of the 60’s and 70’s. It was the original brainchild of Barbara Hulanicki, a skilled fashion illustrator-turned-designer from Jerusalem. Hulanicki’s family moved to England when she was just a child. Unlike most of the fashion retailers of today, Biba had humble beginnings and started off as a tiny mail-order boutique with a few cheap garments all cut to the same skinny size. Barbara wanted her designs to take off quickly and the first dress to become popular (and make the brand famous) was a simple gingham shift dress. This dress was advertised in the Daily Mirror and quickly went out of stock and into the homes of thousands of fashionable teenagers living in the UK, almost faster than she could have made them. After such a success, Hulanicki opened her first shop in Kensington in 1964, this became instantly popular as the young and fashionable flocked to pick up the cheap, wearable and devastatingly fashionable designs.

Working alone without assistants or apprentices, MANOLO BLAHNIK (1942-) is solely responsible for the design of every one of the thousands of shoes that bear his name. He has dominated shoe design since setting up in business in London in the early 1970s. He is solely responsible for the design and prototype of every shoe that bears his name. Working alone without apprentices or assistants, he sketches his shoes, chisels the wooden lasts on which they are moulded and sculpts the heels. He then supervises their production and even sketches the illustrations for his advertising campaigns. He has achieved all this without any formal training in shoe-making. “I didn’t need it,” Blahnik told his friend Michael Roberts only half-jokingly in the late 1970s, “because I’ve got the best taste in the world.”

In 1934, an apparel company called "Lilli Ann" was originated by Adolph Schuman and named for his wife Lillian. Originally this apparel company was a typical sort of start-up operation, with two used sewing machines and two part-time employees working in a tiny studio in the Chinatown district of San Francisco. Throughout the life of the company, it would be identified with San Francisco, both in advertising and in its economic and political influence in that city.