by David Sasso, who died at the age of 92, was half with Belinda Bellville from Bellville Sasso, the Couture House, which became a favorite for royal family members and celebrities. He was a loyal ally of Diana, Princess of Wales and helped, to lead her fashion selection when she took over and developed her public role.
In an interview for the Channel 5 2019 documentary, Secrets of the Royal Wardrobe, Sasso remembered how he had met the young lady Diana Spencer for the first time when her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, took her to the Belville Sassoon Studio in Rightsbridge in advance of her wedding. She had visited the business before her engagement, but went out again when a bidder of French Venduse suggested that she could be more at home at Harrod.
Her mother brought her to make a trousseau and Diana chose about 10 dresses. “I was thrilled that she asked us to design her lovely outfit,” recalled Sassoon, “although I was disappointed that we didn’t do her wedding dress.”
Over the years, Sassoon made more than 70 clothes for the princess and remembered that when she met for the first time, she was painfully shy and moved to her mother’s advice. The early outfits were the dress in the sailor style, which she wore for her first official portrait and her peach-go-away outfit. But “a year after she had married, she knew exactly what she wanted.”
When Diana appeared in the royal scene for the first time, many of the “rules” of the Sartorial label were still available: “They could not wear a velvet after May and had to wear a hat for every wedding.” The princess changed everything: “[She] stopped wearing gloves and was the first to wore pants. She also stopped wearing hats. Sometimes she said to me: “I want to surprise everyone.” It was a pleasure to dress – not difficult at all. In contrast to what you might think, she did not make any excitement about clothing. She had no endless equipment. “
The princess often returned to nothing more than the word “Please!” Written properly in the pencil. Small gifts and thank -you notes always followed the delivery of a dress.
Among other things, Sassoon created the shoulder -free dress, which she was wearing for the opening of the exhibition “Splendours of the Gonzaga” and the scarlet evening dress she wore to meet Rudolf Nureyev, 1982 1982. In his interview in his channel 5, he remembered an opportunity when the princess had outlined a design for the opening of the parliament from 1981. It showed “a satin bodice, white organza, which is embroidered with small silver trees that are littered everywhere at buffer steam points”. But it was not a success: “It was her only effort. She never designed a dress again.”
At first glance, her was an unlikely alliance. Sasso was the son of Sephardi Jewish immigrants from Iraq, Diana, the daughter of an early. He was almost 30 years older and several centimeters shorter than his royal client. But the two became great friends.
“She always asked:” What did you do, what did you see? “Sassoon said the Daily Mail. There were times when I was quite stressed and she knocked the sofa next to her and said:” Well, what is the problem? Sit down and drink a cup of tea. ‘She was good at listening to her suffering, but she rarely opened her own. The only time that I cried her was the week before the wedding. “
On this occasion, Diana arrived from a wedding test in St. Paul’s cathedral in the Ritterbridge studio: “It was the last adaptation for going-away outfit and she was very tearful and in panic because she had forgotten to get a bag. I told her that she was not worried. … She was very touched.”
Sassoon was a guest at Diana’s wedding and later at her funeral and remembered how they had crossed a few weeks before their tragic death in 1997 when previewing a charity at Christie’s path. They talked about the outfits that Sassoon had made for them over the years, including the path she wore on her wedding day. He asked if it was in the auction and was happy about her answer: “Oh no! I don’t lose it.”
The third of six children, David Sasso, was born on October 5, 1932 in Highbury, Nordlondon. His parents George Sasso and Victoria, née Gurgi, came to Great Britain from their native Baghdad in 1925 and never left. When the family’s house was bombarded at the beginning of the war, the family moved to Llandudno, where David was sent to the boarding school.
He wanted to become an actor and won a scholarship for Rada, “but my father, who was very near the east, was not happy about the idea. So he was persuaded that I would make the little one of the two evil what fashion was.” Sasso was interested in clothing at a young age, his younger sister clad in hand-sewn creations and was around his mother’s bird copies. He visited the Chelsea College of Art after the national service at RAF in Egypt, the Royal College of Art.
At his graduate exhibition in 1958, he met Belinda Bellville, who founded the Couture House Bellville and Cie in Knightsbridge five years earlier. She was pregnant and looked for an assistant designer. She offered him a temporary job and he stayed for 50 years. The company became Bellville Sassoon in 1970 and took over when Belinda Bellville retired in 1984.
The first Bellville Sassoon Royal Commission took place in January 1960 when Lady Pamela married Mountbatten David Hicks. Princess Anne was one of the bridesmaids and the young Sassoon was sent to Buckingham Palace to match the princess’s eight -year dress. “I had to go through the entrance to the craftsmen,” he recalled. A deleted side brought him to kindergarten. “There were ink stains on the carpet and toys everywhere. Princess Anne wore Clark’s sandals and had braces on his teeth.”
When the queen appeared, Sassoon took a step back to take an arch: “My foot went into one of the shells of the Corgis, which was full of water, which was sprayed over my shoes. The queen pulled a cord on the side of the fireplace and came.
After her marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones in the same year, Princess Margaret Bellville Sassoon commissioned to design her clothes for a visit to the USA. The American press gave every outfit a score, and Sassoon was happy when all the Bellville Sasso’s outfits were given five stars: “Poor [Norman] Hartnell and others have not done so well. “
Until then, the fashion house only made couture. Women came in and bought a wardrobe – cocktail dresses, evening dresses, an outfit for Ascot and so on throughout the season. Sassoon recorded Belinda Bellville to show him how one is a “friendly” designer. “[She] I taught myself to understand women what many male designers do not do. “
Belinda Belville won customers from Sasso from Sephardi and Ashkenazi (“Jewish traditions played an enormous role in clothing that I designed”) – and learned to hug the youth culture of the 1960s: from Sassoon.
In 1962 the company presented its first collection that proved to be a great success. Until 1970 it employed 100 employees and dressed many of the most fashionable women in London – once that four women at dinner with the queen in Windsor – all appeared in the same Bellville -Sassoon dress. She also designed Audrey Hepburn’s wardrobe for the film Two for the Road (1967).
The other royal customers of Sassoon included Princess Alexandra, her daughter Lady Helen Windsor, Princess Alice, the duke of Gloucester and Kent and Princess Michael von Kent, whose wedding dress he designed, although he regretted that it was never worn for a religious ceremony.
York’s Duchess proved to be a friendly but frustrating customer. “One evening, a car cool could be attracted with two Outiders. It was 6 p.m. and the shop was closed. [The Duchess] Came in and said that she wanted a few clothes and we thought: “Oh dear, really?” She had received terrible press.
“She was very fun, very lively, but she would not listen. I would say:” Oh, come, Ma’am, this skirt is too short for you “, and it would be ‘no, I like it.’ … she would come in a week and lost the next time, then they put it back, and we then took them out forever that they then let them out. “
The creations of Sassoon were presented in numerous exhibitions in the Museum of London Docklands, most recently in 2023 in “Fashion City: How Jewish Londoner shaped the global style”. When he was 80 years old, he was retired, although he was employed as a trustee of the fashion and textile museum and as a mentor of young designers and lecturer on Colleges and Museums. “If you stop looking at the work of young designers, you should give up,” he said once.
David Sasso, born on October 5, 1932, died on April 9, 2025
