He had some 20 jobs in his first two years out of faculty, first as a sample maker after which at a shirt firm. “Blacks had been the largely invisible members of the back-room employees in style homes throughout the Nineteen Sixties,” he wrote in his memoir, and Mr. Haggins was not the back-room type. “Getting employed and fired,” he added, “got here simply to me.”

He started to frequent the celebrity-strewn nightclub Arthur, run by Sybil Burton, the ex-wife of Richard Burton, on East 54th Road. He dressed his common date, a mannequin and highschool buddy named Myrna Stephens, in his personal designs, a unique costume each evening, from which he started to create a set.

In 1966, when he had 12 items, he cold-called editors at style magazines and at Ladies’s Put on Each day, which was the primary publication to cowl him. The editor who got here to see him informed her colleagues, he recalled, that she had simply found “a tall, ebony younger man with essentially the most inspirational fashions.”

Mr. Haggins’s romantic companions had been principally males, however not at all times. He and June Murphy, a mannequin, met in 1970 and determined to marry. That September he turned his present of resort and spring fashions, held on the terrace of an residence in Tudor Metropolis, into their wedding ceremony.

It was a conference of style to finish a present with a mannequin dressed as a bride. Mr. Haggins dressed his bride in a purple print with a trailing purple scarf painted with a butterfly, which wrapped across the two of them as they took their vows. However the marriage lasted only a yr and a half. He was, by his personal admission, chronically untrue, and the divorce was bitter. Their marriage “was a really particular time in my life,” he informed The Instances in 2017, “and I want it had lasted.”

His frothy chiffon and jersey confections typically took flight. At a present at F.I.T., his alma mater, in 1979, when he and different Black designers had been being honored, considered one of his clothes flew up and over a mannequin’s head, drawing a standing ovation from the viewers. When Ms. Williams, the previous journalist, married in 1980, Mr. Haggins designed the bridesmaids’ robes: tea-length chiffon in shades of pink that had been slit to the waist. The marriage was held one blustery night on the Wave Hill public backyard within the Bronx, and throughout the processional a gust lifted the bridesmaids’ skirts like so many sails. The minister, Ms. Williams recalled, declared, “Thanks Jesus!”

Mr. Haggins is survived by his sister, Carolyn Grant.

Mr. Haggins was a person of grand gestures. Through the blackout of 1965, he walked from his residence to a close-by steakhouse carrying a candelabra he’d pinched from the Plaza Lodge, tapers ablaze, and ordered a steak, medium-rare.