Oleg Cassini

Oleg Cassini Loiewski was born on April 11, 1913, in Paris, France, into the family of Russian diplomat Alexander Loiewski and Italian Countess Marguerite Cassini. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Paul Nicholas, Marquis de Capuzzuchi di Bologna, Count de Cassini, worked for the Russian Tsar Nicholas II as a diplomat in China and the United States. Cassini spent his early childhood between Russia and Copenhagen, Denmark, where his father was a diplomat with the Russian Embassy. His family were landed aristocracy in Russia until 1917, when the communists seized their ancestral estate and the family fled to Florence, Italy. There Cassini helped his mother, who worked as a fashion designer of hats at the salon of Countess Fabricotti. He also traveled with his mother to Paris twice a year, where he studied and sketched the new French fashions. In the 1920's-1930's Oleg Cassini studied art at the Academia Belle Arte in Florence under Giorgio De Chirico. In 1933 he opened his own design stud