In the mid-1950s, early in his career as a fashion designer, Arthur McGee had an identity problem of sorts.

“When I’d go to look for lines of fabric, I’d go to the fabric company, and they’d say, ‘Well, where’s the designer?’ ” he recalled decades later when he was being honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “They’d walk right by me. And I’d say, ‘It’s me.’ ”

The slight, it seemed, was because of the color of his skin: Black designers were exceedingly rare at the time. As Newsweek put it in 1992, “Until recently, African-Americans were easy to find in the garment industry: They were the ones pushing the racks of dresses along Seventh Avenue.”

Mr. McGee, who died on July 1 at a nursing home in Manhattan, was a pioneer on that street, the heart of the city’s fashion industry: He was thought to be the first black designer to run the design room of an established Seventh Avenue concern, the Bobbie Brooks line. The cultural historian Aziza Braithwaite Bey, who once worked for Mr. McGee, said that he died after a long illness resulting from a series of aneurysms. He was 86.