Arnold Scaasi (1930-2015) was born Arnold Martin Isaacs in Montreal, Canada, to Samuel and Elizabeth Isaacs. Samuel was a furrier who traveled across the country in search of special raw furs. Arnold finished his early education in Australia before returning to Canada to study at the Cotnoir-Capponi School of Design in Montreal. He continued his fashion design studies at the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture Parisienne in Paris, where he then apprenticed at the House of Paquin.
After returning to New York, Isaacs worked for designer Charles James, who taught him to see dresses as three-dimensional works of art. While freelancing, an art director reversed Isaacs to Scaasi; a red satin coat appeared with his new name on the cover of Vogue magazine in 1955. The following year he opened a ready-to-wear business. His quick success led to Scaasi adding new lines to his label over the years, including menswear, children’s wear, leisure wear, bridal, furs, jewelry, and his signature perfume that debuted in 1989.
After Scaasi won the 1958 Coty Fashion Critics Award, he attracted his first celebrity clients, including actress Joan Crawford, socialite Brooke Astor, and First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. Later he would dress other presidents’ wivesóJackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bushóand many performers such as Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Joan Rivers, Lauren Bacall, and Diahann Carroll. Some clients became close friends, including Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor. Scaasi began visiting Palm Beach in 1967. He counted many islanders as clients and friends, including Mary Sandford, Rose Kennedy, Lesly Smith, Celia Lipton Farris, Therase Anderson, Pauline Pitt, Carol Mack, Ivana Trump, Christine Schwartzman, Barton and Kate Gubelmann, Betty Scripps, Jane Told, Audrey Gruss, and Annette Tappert Allen.
Scaasi has received every major fashion prize, including the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) Lifetime Achievement award (1996), the most prestigious honor in the fashion industry. In the mid-1980s, demand for his services resulted in branching out again, even to the QVC shopping network by 2001. One of the many retrospectives that have been done on Scaasi was in 1996 at the Historical Society of New York where the coffee table book Scaasi A Cut Above was released. He published his memoirs in 2004, Women I Have Dressed (and Undressed!)óa second volume is in the works.
Arnold Scaasi does not dress the average housewife; his clothes are and have always been the “champagne and caviar of the fashion world. “