Kaffe Fassett

Kaffe Fassett (born 1937 as Frank Fassett), is an American-born artist who is best known for his colourful designs in the decorative arts—needlepoint, patchwork, knitting, painting and ceramics. While still a child, Fassett renamed himself after an Egyptian boy character from the book Boy of the Pyramid by Ruth Fosdick Jones) (rhymes with 'safe asset')

Early life

The second of five children, Fassett was born in 1937 in San Francisco, California, to parents William and Madeleine. He is the great-grandson of the wealthy businessman, lawyer and United States Congressman Jacob Sloat Fassett, and it was his great-great grandparents who founded the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. He received a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the age of 19, but shortly left school to paint in London and moved there to live in 1964.

Career

In the late 1960s Fassett met the Scottish fashion designer Bill Gibb, with whom he was in a relationship for a while. Until Gibb's premature death in 1988, they were very close friends and design collaborators, with Fassett creating many of the multicoloured, complex knitwear designs that became one of Gibb's trademarks. When one of Bill Gibb's designs was chosen by Beatrix Miller of Vogue as the 1970 Dress of the Year, the ensemble included a Fassett hand-knitted waistcoat, showing that traditional textile handicrafts had become an acceptable aspect of mainstream fashion. Fassett and Gibb worked together through to the end, collaborating on Gibb's final collection in 1985.