FASHION DESIGNERS
Levi Straus Levi jeans
Levi Strauss was a German born American businessman who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm of Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi's) began in 1853 in San Francisco, California. Jacob W. Davis (born Jacob Youphes; was a Latvian-born American tailor who is credited with inventing modern jeans by using sturdy cloth and rivets to strengthen weak points in the seams, and partnered with Levi Strauss to mass-produce them.
Kenneth Cole
Kenneth D. Cole is an American clothing designer. His father, Charles Cole, owned the El Greco shoe manufacturing company.As an American fashion house he wanted to preview his line of shoes at the New York Shoe Expo at the New York Hilton, but he was unable to afford the purchase of a hotel room or showroom to display his items. He wanted to park a trailer two blocks from the Hilton Hotel. Parking permits for trailers were only granted to utility and production companies, Cole changed the name of his company, and applied for a permit to film the full-length film, "The Birth of a Shoe Company". In two and a half days, Kenneth Cole Productions sold forty thousand pairs of shoes, while chronicling the beginning of the company on film.
Rudi Gernreich
Rudolf "Rudi" Gernreich was an Austrian-born American fashion designer whose avant-garde clothing designs are generally regarded as the most innovative and dynamic fashion of the 1960s. He purposefully used fashion design as a social statement to advance sexual freedom, producing clothes that followed the natural form of the female body, freeing them from the constraints of high fashion. He was the first to use cutouts, vinyl, and plastic in clothing. He designed the first thong bathing suit, unisex clothing, the first swimsuit without a built-in bra, the minimalist, soft, transparent No Bra, and the topless monokini
Marc Jacobs
Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs,
He was the creative director of the French design house Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2014. Jacobs was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and #14 on Out magazine's 2012 list of "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America". He was married on April 6, 2019 to his long time partner, Charly Defrancesco.
Jordache brothers Joe, Ralph, and Avi Nakash (Naccache)
An American Clothing company which originated in 1969, when Israeli brothers Joe, Ralph, and Avi Nakash (Naccache) opened a store in New York City that sold premium jeans. Inspired by European fashions, the brothers had developed a groundbreaking collection with a signature fit that was tight and sexy.
Donna Karan DKNY
Donna Karan born Donna Ivy Faske is an American fashion designer and the creator of the Donna Karan New York and DKNY clothing labels. She went to the Parsons School of Design. Karan worked for Anne Klein, eventually becoming head of the Anne Klein design-team. She launched Donna Karan and DKNY labels in 1984
Calvin Klein
Calvin Richard Klein attended but never graduated from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. He did his apprenticeship in 1962 at an old line cloak-and-suit manufacturer, Dan Millstein,[and spent five years designing at other New York City shops. In 1968, he launched his first company with a childhood friend Barry K. Schwartz.
He became a protégé of Baron de Gunzburg,[7] through whose introductions he became the toast of the New York elite fashion scene even before he had his first mainstream success with the launch of his first jeans line.
Michael Kors
Michael David Kors (born Karl Anderson Jr.; August 9, 1959[2]) is an American fashion designer. His mother is Jewish; his father was of Swedish descent.[Michael Kors, which sells men's and women's ready-to-wear, accessories, watches, jewellery, footwear, and fragrance. Kors was the first women's ready-to-wear designer for the French house Celine, from 1997 to 2003.[4] On January 2, 2019, Michael Kors Holdings Limited officially changed its name to Capri Holdings Limited (NYSE: CPRI).[5] Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo, and Versace are the three founder-led brands under Capri Holdings Limited.[6
Ralph Lauren Polo
Ralph Lauren, born Lifshitz; is an American fashion designer
He worked briefly for Brooks Brothers as a sales assistant before becoming a salesman for a tie company. The Ralph Lauren Corporation started in 1967 with men's ties. At 28 years old, Lauren worked for the tie manufacturer Beau Brummell, where he convinced the company's president to let him start his own line.
Drawing on his interests in sports, Lauren named his first full line of menswear 'Polo' in 1968. He worked out of a single "drawer" from a showroom in the Empire State Building and made deliveries to stores himself.[22] By 1969, the Manhattan department store Bloomingdale's sold Lauren's men line exclusively. It was the first time that Bloomingdale's had given a designer their own in-store boutique
In 1972, the Ralph Lauren Corporation introduced a signature cotton mesh Polo shirt in various colors. Featuring the polo player logo at the chest, the shirt became emblematic of the preppy look—one of Ralph Lauren's signature styles.
In 1974, he outfitted the male cast of The Great Gatsby in costumes from his Polo line – a 1920s-style series of men's suits and sweaters, except for the pink suit which Lauren designed especially for Robert Redford's Jay Gatsby. In 1977, Diane Keaton and Woody Allen wore Lauren's clothes throughout their Oscar-winning film, Annie Hall
Hart Schaffner Marx
· Hart Schaffner Marx, founded in 1887 is an American manufacturer of tailored menswear. They started as a small retail shop for tailored men’s suits. At the same time, however, the wholesale business began to grow, overtaking the retail operations. On the strength of wholesale production, Hart, Abt and Marx won contracts to produce clothing for the U.S. military. This introduced the partners to prefabricated off-the-rack clothing and marked their entry into the ready-to-wear suit trade.
By 1906 the company had branched into sizes for men who were unusually tall, short, or overweight. Hart Schaffner & Marx thus became a mass-market brand, enabling virtually any man to have a fine quality suit at a lower price than a custom tailored suit.
Isaac Mizrahi
Isaac Mizrahi is an American fashion designer. He attended Yeshivah of Flatbush, High School of Performing Arts, and the Parsons School of Design.[His Father,Zeke Mizrahi was a children's clothing manufacturer.
Among Mizrahi's fans and clients were Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman, Selma Blair, Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker, Debra Messing and Natalie Portman.[12]
Mizrahis clothing designs were hit or miss and the lack of consistency caused his businesses to fail.
Zac Posen
Zachary E. Posen is an American fashion designer. As a teen, he also won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award.[8] At age 16 he enrolled in the pre-college program at Parsons The New School for Design.[9] He graduated from Saint Ann's in 1999. For three years, Posen was mentored by curator Richard Martin at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. At age 18, he was accepted into the womenswear degree program at London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design at the University of the Arts London.
His awards include the Council of Fashion Designers of America's 2004 Swarovski's Perry Ellis Award for Womenswear. Posen has become a favorite of Natalie Portman, Rihanna, Amanda Seyfried, Andy Dick, Kate Winslet, Claire Danes, Cameron Diaz, Dick Clark, Jennifer Lopez, Mischa Barton, Mr. Kool Aid, Beyoncé Knowles
HAIR STYLISTS
Vidal Sassoon
Vidal Sassoon CBE (17 January 1928 – 9 May 2012) was a British hairstylist, businessman, and philanthropist. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hair style called the bob cut, worn by famous fashion designers including Mary Quant and film stars such as Mia Farrow, Goldie Hawn, Cameron Diaz, Nastassja Kinski and Helen Mirren.[1]
His early life was one of extreme poverty, with seven years of his childhood spent in an orphanage. He quit school at age 14, soon holding various jobs in London during World War II. Although he hoped to become a professional football player, he became an apprentice hairdresser at the suggestion of his mother.
COSMETICS
Revlon
Revlon was founded in New York City on March 1, 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, by Jewish American brothers Charles Revson and Joseph Revson along with a chemist, Charles Lachman, who contributed the "L" in the Revlon name.[5] They started with a single product, a new type of nail enamel[5] — the three founders pooled their resources and developed a unique manufacturing process. Using pigments instead of dyes, Revlon developed a variety of new shades of nail enamel.[5] In 1937, Revlon started selling the polishes in department stores and pharmacies. In six years, the company became a multimillion-dollar organization. By 1940, Revlon offered an entire manicure line, and added lipstick to the collection. During World War II, Revlon created makeup and related products for the United States Army, which was honored in 1944 with the Army-Navy "E" Award for Excellence.
Lipstick became widely popular after Maurice Levy's 1915 invention of the metal lipstick container.
Max Factor
Max Factor was founded in 1909 as Max Factor & Company by Maksymilian Faktorowicz, a Jewish beautician from Poland. In the early years of the business Factor personally applied his products to actors and actresses. He developed a reputation for being able to customize makeup to present actors and actresses in the best possible light on screen. Among his most notable clients were Mabel Normand, Ben Turpin, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball and Judy Garland.[4] As a result, virtually all of the major movie actresses were regular customers of the Max Factor beauty salon, located near Hollywood Boulevard.
Lip pomade, also called lip gloss, was later invented by Max Factor, Sr. in an effort to provide a glamorous appearance to actress' lips on film. Soon after, 'natural' lip gloss was created, which used bromo acid to create a red effect as it reacted with the wearer's skin.
Helena Rubenstein
Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein) was a Jewish Polish-American businesswoman.
After refusing an arranged marriage, Rubinstein emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1896, with no money and little English.[6] Her stylish clothes and milky complexion was noticed among the town's ladies, and she soon found enthusiastic buyers for the jars of beauty cream in her luggage. A key ingredient of the cream, lanolin, was readily at hand.
Coleraine, in the Western Victoria region, where her uncle was a shopkeeper, might have been an "awful place" but was home to some 75 million sheep that secreted abundant quantities of lanolin. To disguise the lanolin's pungent odour, Rubinstein experimented with lavender, pine bark, and water lilies.
Estee Lauder
Estée Lauder (born Josephine Esther Mentzer)
When Lauder grew older, she agreed to help her uncle, Dr. John Schotz, a chemist, and his company, New Way Laboratories, sell beauty products such as creams, lotions, rouge, and fragrances.
Lauder named one of her uncle's blends Super Rich All-Purpose Cream, and began selling the preparation to her friends. She sold creams like Six-In-One cold cream and Dr. Schotz's Viennese Cream to beauty shops, beach clubs and resorts. One day, as she was getting her hair done at the House of Ash Blondes, the salon's owner Florence Morris asked Lauder about her perfect skin. Soon, Estée returned to the beauty parlor to hand out four of her uncle's creams and demonstrate their use. Morris was so impressed that she asked Lauder to sell her products at Morris' new salon.
In 1953, Lauder introduced her first fragrance, Youth-Dew, a bath oil that doubled as a perfume. Instead of using French perfumes by the drop behind each ear, women began using Youth-Dew by the bottle in their bath water. In the first year, it sold 50,000 bottles; by 1984, the figure had risen to 150 million
Helene Fortunoff
Helene Fortunoff, one of the country’s most successful jewelry retailers and matriarch of the Fortunoff family, was best known as a jewelry entrepreneur and shrewd businesswoman who started out with a few showcases in her family’s housewares store on Livonia Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1950s and grew the business into a multi-million-dollar chain anchored by a flagship store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
Born in 1933 to Samuel and Tillie Finke in Paterson, N.J., she graduated cum laude with a degree in business administration from New York University, where she met her first husband, Alan Fortunoff, with whom she had six children. Her jewelry career began when she entered Alan’s family housewares business, started in 1922 by Max and Clara Fortunoff.
Helene Fortunoff was instrumental in establishing Fortunoff Fine Jewelry and Silverware, the fine jewelry and housewares retail chain that had stores in Westbury, White Plains, Manhattan, Paramus, N.J., Wayne, N.J. and Woodbridge, N.J. She retired in 2005 after the sale of the company, which had been recognized by National Jeweler magazine two years earlier as the 24 largest jewelry retailer in the United States
Vidal Sassoon CBE was a British hairstylist, businessman, and philanthropist. He was noted for repopularising a simple, close-cut geometric hairstyle called the bob cut, worn by famous fashion designers including and film stars
His early life was one of extreme poverty, with seven years of his childhood spent in an orphanage. He quit school at age 14, soon holding various jobs in London during World War II. Although he hoped to become a professional football player, he became an apprentice hairdresser at the suggestion of his mother.
After developing a reputation for his innovative cuts, he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, where he opened the first chain of worldwide hairstyling salons, complemented by a line of hair-treatment products.
He sold his business interests in the early 1980s and began funding Israeli think tanks with his profits.