High-Fashion Styles in Entertaining 4: Kasper

Fashion designers at home, 1976

Following Geoffrey Beene, Mary McFadden, and Albert Capraro, the fourth fashion designer House Beautiful featured in 1976, regarding their hosting style, was Herbert Kasper. Usually known by the mononym “Kasper,” he was a true gentleman designer. When he passed away at 93 on March 4^th, 2020, he was truly the last of a generation.

Kasper at the time of the Coty Award announcement. New York Times, October 3, 1955.

From New York City, Kasper studied English and advertising at NYU before serving in the US Army during World War II. Once home, he enrolled at Parsons School of Design, before studying at L‘Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. While in Paris in the early 1950s, he freelanced at Christian Dior, Marcel Rochas, and Jacques Fath. Upon returning to New York, Kasper became designer for Penart, a small dress company. Soon he was discovered by Lord & Taylor, feted in their ads and windows as a new young talent. In 1955, he married Betsy Pickering, one of the most famous fashion models in America—both dark-haired and flawlessly elegant, the paid cut a dash through Seventh Avenue before divorcing in 1958. After moving to Arnold & Fox, he won a “Winnie” award for outstanding achievement in fashion design at the Coty’s in 1955; he received a return award in 1970 before being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1976. Kasper settled at Joan Leslie (the better price dress division of Leslie Fay Inc.) in 1963, where he stayed until 1985 (eventually becoming vice president and head designer of the firm.)

Kasper for Joan Leslie, spring/summer 1966.

“His clothes are recognizable for their directness; he refuses to encumber them with unnecessary gewgaws, relying rather on the fineness of materials and his own ingenuity to achieve the desired effect.” – New York Times, 1953

Known for his attractively priced yet elegant dresses, suits and sportswear, Kasper always tried to make high-quality garments at non-luxury prices. Stan Herman—fashion designer and former president of the CFDA—said of him, “He built a business of very smart clothing that captured the winds of the time. He knew the right people and got the right information to produce the clothes that were very desirable and sold.”  As Kasper told the New York Times in 1967, “I’m not interested in momentary fashion headlines. I want to provide good clothes that people can live with.” Successful throughout his career, a very smart licensing deal for suits (Kasper for ASL) in the 1980s built up his fortune; according to Herman, it “gave him the strength to do what he wanted to do. The Kasper suit was the thing to wear.”

Kasper with a model at a showing of his clothes at the City Line Saks Fifth Avenue. Photo by Charles W. James, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 1975.

That fortune enabled him to focus on his great love, collecting art. As a student in Paris, Kasper began his collection with a romantic wash by Second Empire illustrator Constantin Guys; it later grew to include works by artists as diverse as Fra Bartolomeo, Giorgio Vasari, Pablo Picasso, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jenny Holzer. In 2011, the Morgan Library presented, “Mannerism and Modernism: The Kasper Collection of Drawings and Photographs.” Throughout his life, the collection hung in his unimpeachably elegant homes. While I have been unable to discover anything about the apartment featured in the 1976 House Beautiful story, in 1979, Kasper purchased a 4,700 square foot co-op at the Verona, 32 East 64^th Street, to be his new marital home—he had just wed art dealer Richard Feigen’s ex, Sandra Canning. They purchased it from the estate of socialite Minnie Cushing Fosbugh and her husband Jim Fosburgh for $400,000.