Oleg Cassini, a son of impoverished Italian and Russian nobility who achieved fame and wealth as a fabulously successful couturier, designing clothes for some of the world's most glamorous women as well as middle-class shoppers, died on Friday on Long Island, where he had a home. He was 92.
His death, at a Long Island hospital, was announced by his wife, Marianne Cassini. He also had a home in Manhattan.
Cassini had the longest career of any designer in America, covering seven decades. He achieved perhaps his greatest fame as the official wardrobe designer for Jacqueline Kennedy when she was first lady; he also designed clothes for Joan Fontaine, Joan Crawford and other Hollywood stars and women of great wealth. But throughout his career he also saw to it that his name appeared on ready-to-wear fashions that were affordable to average women.
The Cassini signature was also available, under license, to the makers of women's hosiery, hats, shoes, gloves, girdles, jewelry, furs, swimsuits, sportswear and sunglasses. And he did not overlook clothing for men: slacks, neckties, underwear, belts and sweaters.
Cassini himself was quick to profess that he was, above all, about women. He adored them, he said. He loved thinking about how he might drape fine cloth on them, how much to reveal and how much to keep secret.
"My philosophy is this: Do not tamper with the anatomy of a woman's body; do not camouflage it," he told The New York Post in 1961.
Cassini famously inveighed against the sack dress and other shape-concealing fashions from the French in the early 1960s. His own label, introduced in 1950, was predicated on "an incredibly hourglass, body-revealing, high-impact, one might go so far as to say quite sexually charged clothing," said Hamish Bowles, the European editor at large for Vogue magazine. "His aesthetic, however, remained always within the framework of 1950s propriety."
Bowles showcased many of Cassini's designs as the curator of "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001.
Cassini spent a lifetime talking and listening to women, and many of them returned the favor, flocking to greet him at public appearances well into his 10th decade. An avowed admirer of Casanova, he called his models the harem. But he denied that his relationship to women was in any way predatory. "I needed affection, and I did it the old fashioned way," he said. "I earned it."
He loved to recount his loves. "There were always beautiful girls," he wrote in his autobiography. He pursued and married Merry Fahrney, heiress to a cough syrup fortune. After that marriage failed, he pursued and married Gene Tierney, the actress. And when that marriage failed as well, he was seen in the company of heiresses, debutantes, showgirls, ingenues. Between, before or after his two marriages, he dated young starlets like Betty Grable and Lana Turner and actresses like Ursula Andress and Grace Kelly, to whom he was briefly engaged.
"He was a true playboy, in the Hollywood sense," said Diane von Furstenberg, the fashion designer and a friend of Cassini.
Oleg Loiewski Cassini was born on April 11, 1913, the son of Marguerite Cassini, an Italian countess, and Alexander Loiewski, a Russian diplomat descended from a long line of Eastern European nobles. Countess Cassini's father, Arthur Paul Nicholas, Marquis de Capuzzuchi di Bologna, Count de Cassini, was born in Trieste but went to Russia and worked for the czar in various capacities, including diplomatic posts in China and the United States.
Oleg's younger brother, Igor, became a controversial society columnist for The New York Journal-American and other Hearst newspapers, writing under the name Cholly Knickerbocker. He died in 2002.
In addition to his wife, Cassini is survived by two daughters, Daria Cassini and Christina Belmont, and four grandchildren.