Jacques Kaplan, 83, bold furrier, dies

Tag : Mink Skins

He designed fur furniture, commissioned fur art and hired artistslike Stella and Anuszkiewicz to help promote his bolder designs.Babe Paley, wife of the CBS chairman William Paley, had Kaplancarpet her bathroom floor in Indian lamb's wool. A boutique thesalon owned across the street sold fur by the yard, which inventivecustomers used to upholster car seats or line closets.
"He found ways to make the business fun and exciting and attract anew clientele," Pascal Kaplan said. "He liked to create what hecalled 'noise.' "
Kaplan, who pronounced his last name ka-PLAHN, in the Frenchmanner, was born in Paris in 1924, surrounded by an extended familyof furriers. The business had been founded by his maternalgrandfather, a Russian émigré, and his father conductedit with a sure, if unadventurous, hand.
As the Nazis overran France, the family fled to Antibes, whereJacques joined a resistance group. In 1942, his father took thefamily to New York and re-established the fur business on FifthAvenue, but Jacques soon left for Britain to train as an officerwith the Free French Army at St. Cyr, the French military academy,which had been moved to London.
Kaplan served as a liaison officer with the Fifth Armed Division,which was part of the Seventh Army in North Africa. He took part inthe landing in the South of France and, after experiencing combatin Alsace, finished the war in Austria. He was awarded the Croix deGuerre for sneaking across German lines to warn American forcesthat the town in the Vosges that they occupied was about to beencircled.
Kaplan studied at the Sorbonne, with plans to teach philosophy, butthe family business won out after he married Claude Puiforcat, amember of the famed family of French silversmiths. The couple movedto New York, where Kaplan joined his father in the fur salon. Thecouple had a son, Pascal (named after the philosopher BlaisePascal), and a daughter, Laurence. The marriage ended in divorce in1956, the year Kaplan took over as director and designer of the fursalon.
One day in the late 1950s, Kaplan wandered by chance into an artgallery near the fur salon and became so entranced by a paintingthere that he traded a fur for it. This flamboyant gesture broughthim entrée into the New York art world, where he felt right athome.
A gregarious teetotaler, he gave lavish parties at his Upper EastSide apartment for his Bohemian friends, disappearing as theevening wore on and checking into the Westbury Hotel to enjoy agood night's rest. "I turned into a sort of East Village beatnik onFifth Avenue," he later recalled.
Art and fur marched hand in hand from then on. Dead set on enjoyinga profession that, frankly, left him cold, he gave fancy free rein.While quietly dealing in mainstays like full-length mink coats, heexperimented with novelties like shirred mink, from which he maderaincoats. Inspired by geometric art, he created a square minkcoat. In an idle moment, he came up with a piece of kinetic artthat involved spinning wheels of monkey fur.
In the late 1960s, distressed by the dwindling population of rareanimals, Kaplan swore off the use of leopard and cheetah,infuriating rival furriers and earning the praise of the World WideFund for Nature. Soon after, he displayed a coat ornamented withthe skins of imported alley cats, a rare public relations gaffe.