Jay Jason Jaxon

Eugene Jackson (August 30, 1941 – July 19, 2006), known professionally as Jay Jaxon, was an American fashion designer, costumer, and couturier.

He was the first American and the first Black person to work as a couturier for a fashion atelier in Paris. He worked for the fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, and Jean-Louis Scherrer. Jaxon became creative director of the house of Jean-Louis Scherrer at the age of 24 and released his first haute couture collection as head designer in 1970. Jaxon designed outfits worn by dancers who performed during a 1983 television tribute to Motown Records and designed clothing for such television shows as The Division, Angel, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Ally McBeal, and American Dreams, as well as the films The Men's Club and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Jaxon's life's work was not well documented until 2018 when Rachel Fenderson, a Jamaican American fashion historian, designer, curator, and the lead authority on Jay Jaxon centered her master's thesis “JAY JAXON: A Biographical Study and Media Discourse Analysis Reinstating a Designer into Fashion History” on Jaxon while attending the Parsons School of Design. Fenderson was able to find over fifty newspaper articles mentioning Jaxon found in many of his designs in magazines but noted that, in some instances, he was not being tracked in the metadata of the archival databases of those publications. As a part of her research, Fenderson curated an exhibition about the designer, which was on display at such venues as the Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris in 2018 and at the Queens Historical Society in Queens, New York in 2020. In a 2021 article in The New York Times, it was reported that Fenderson was writing a book about Jaxon.

Personal life Jaxon lived for two decades in the Windsor Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles with his partner, Lloyd Hardy.

Jaxon died of complications of prostate cancer on July 19, 2006. He was 64. At the time of his death he was making plans to release a line of plus-size dresses.