Designer Geoffrey Beene dies at 77

NEW YORK – Geoffrey Beene, the award-winning designer whose simple but classic styles for men and women put him at the forefront of American fashion, died Tuesday at 77.

Beene died at his home of complications of pneumonia, according to Russell Nardozza, vice president of Geoffrey Beene Inc.

The designer launched his own company on a shoestring budget in 1963 and turned it into a fashion empire. Along with Bill Blass, Beene was regarded as one of the godfathers of American sportswear.

Beene, who had planned to become a doctor but found himself daydreaming instead about fashions, was an eight-time winner of the Coty Fashion Critics Award and the first American designer to show his clothes in Milan, Italy. He was widely hailed for his innovative and iconoclastic work.

“A designer’s designer, Geoffrey Beene is one of the most artistic and individual of fashion’s creators,” read the plaque given to him on New York’s Fashion Center Walk of Fame. A 1993 New York Times article described him as “an artist who chooses to work in cloth.”