Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

Internationally-acclaimed fashion designer Oleg Cassini, who created a fashion powerhouse and helped make Jacqueline Kennedy America’s most glamorous first lady as well as the Hollywood elite, died Friday at the age of 92, his family said.

Cassini’s wife, Marianne, said that Cassini had been in excellent health until complaining of a serious headache last Friday. He had been busy with work that day by attending meetings, reviewing designs and writing letters. Later at their Long Island home he complained of a serious headache suffered a broken blood vessel in his head and died in a Long Island hospital.

Oleg Cassini was born in Paris in April 1913 to an Italian countess and a Russian diplomat. He raised in Italy and began his career in Europe, operating a fashion boutique in Rome then moved to the United States in 1936.
In 1960, then-first lady Jacqueline Kennedy appointed him her official designer and gained fame for dressing such Hollywood celebrities as Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney, who later became his wife.
He made more than 100 dresses in the first year of the Kennedy administration and 300 more thereafter, helping the first lady for her personal clothing style, complementing her dresses and outer wear with matching hats, furs, gloves, shoes, handbags and gain recognition as one of the best-dressed women in Washington.

Cassini also began designing costumes for Paramount Studios, started with the Veronica Lake starred film “I Wanted Wings,” and went on to dress more of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, including Grace Kelly, to whom he was once engaged, and Gene Tierney, to whom he was married from 1941 to 1952.
After divorced on 1952, he continued his designer career in Hollywood until the late 1960s.

During World War II, the designer served in the US Cavalry Corps, but then returned to New York and opened his own design house in New York’s Seventh Avenue fashion district.
His business grew to include two especially well-known clients — Jacqueline Kennedy and Johnny Carson, popular host of the “Tonight Show.”
He continued his design work in New York for several decades, pioneering several successful clothes lines, including ready-to-wear sheath dresses as well as the Nehru jacket and the turtleneck look for men, knitted suits, cocktail dresses, and men’s shirts as well as perfume lines. He was also a pioneer in licensing agreements that put his name on a range of products other than clothes.