JOE EULA captured fashion’s most glorious twists and turns, from Dior’s New Look until the end of Yves Saint Laurent’s reign. He covered Saint Laurent’s first show, in 1958, and was there for his last in 2002.

He was not a designer, but had the prescient instinct and natural eye that the best designers trusted. His brilliance lay not just in his ability to get his insights on to paper as an illustrator but in his understanding of the industry as a whole; he saw that Saint Laurent’s first show was not only a joy to draw but was also revolutionary or, as he described it, “a trip to the moon for fashion”.

Eula was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1925, the second of four children. He was 2 when his father died, and his mother, Lena, supported the family by running a grocery shop. After graduating from high school in 1942, Eula served in the ski-borne 10th Mountain Division in Italy during the war, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star. While a student at the Art Students League in Manhattan after the war, he had his first illustrations published in Town & Country magazine when Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg was editor. He also produced drawings for Saks Fifth Avenue.

Eula’s work, in ink and charcoal, was distinguished by a light, zippy hand and a natural sense of female movement and how clothes can work both with and against the body.

“I was considered the fastest pencil in the field; a model need only do her turn down the catwalk, and voilà: an illustration,” he once said. Fashion illustration in Eula’s day was more prized than the quirky editorial feature it is often reduced to now; it was considered the most classiest and most high-minded way to depict a look. In the 1950s, Eula’s illustrations accompanied The New York Herald Tribune’s influential fashion columns by Eugenia Sheppard, with whom he attended the collections in Paris twice a year. At the same time his drawings lifted the pages of The Sunday Times and American Vogue; he also had longstanding associations with Italian and French Harper’s Bazaar.

He won a Tony for his work on the Broadway production of Private Lives in 1968, and directed television specials for Lauren Bacall. He created album covers and concert posters for performers such as Miles Davis, Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler and the Supremes, and designed costumes for the New York City Ballet, most notably for Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine. He illustrated Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers and designed a line of china for the company.

In 1970, he became creative director at the house of Halston, acting as a muse, a provocateur and a sensitive but sensible filter for Halston’s glittering torrent of ideas. Three years later, when Halston and four other American designers went to Versailles to present their clothes opposite five French couturiers, Eula created the backdrop for the Americans’ set. When it was discovered that the drapery they had planned to use fell short of the stage floor because of a faulty conversion from metres into yards, Eula bought a roll of white paper, and using black oven paint and a broom, sketched the Eiffel Tower. It was remembered as a sensation for years.

In 1977, Eula persuaded Halston to go to a hot new club on West 54th Street in Manhattan, the now legendary Studio 54. That visit marked the beginning of Halston’s long relationship with the club, and Eula’s professional partnership with it: he designed the club’s logo, which is still used today. While working for Halston he managed to also fit in work for fashion houses such as Chanel, Givenchy, Versace and Yves Saint Laurent.

Eula loved every bubble of fashion, but was not so embroiled that he couldn’t make astute and sometimes acerbic observations. When The New York Times asked him recently to record great parties he had attended, he recalled with naughty glee the especially thin-skinned tomatoes Diana Vreeland had supplied one Sunday lunchtime with ice-cold vodka; the “night picnic of roast chicken, a good bottle of wine and M&Ms for dessert” he had enjoyed with Marilyn Monroe; the turtle soup at the designer Pauline Trigere’s dazzling Park Avenue flat; the pasta on a yacht with “many barefoot cabin boys” and Marella Agnelli of the Fiat dynasty, who, Eula thought, possessed “the most gorgeous neck in the world”.

From the 1980s up until the month he died, Eula began to spend more time at his home in the Hudson Valley where even his baskets of fruit and vegetables reflected his flair and delight in detail. He designed another line of chinaware for Tiffany based on flowers and animals, which continues to sell. He drew his last series of illustrations in August for The New York Times, which showed the best coats for autumn.

He is survived by his sister and two brothers.

Joe Eula, fashion illustrator, was born on January 16, 1925. He died on October 27, 2004, aged 79.