Mr. Alan Flusser's Biography      Alan Flusser is the President of Alan Flusser Designs, a menswear business he founded in 1979. At the high end, Mr. Flusser owns and operates the high profile Alan Flusser Custom Shop. Having taken up residence in Saks Fifth Avenue for seven years in 1993, the twenty-year old custom clothing business now occupies two elegant floors of a six story townhouse on 3 East 48th.   In the fall 2001, Mr. Flusser debuted a popularly priced exclusive collection of menswear for the mass retailer, Steinmart. Today an expanded presentation of Mr. Flusser’s sportswear, tailored clothes, and accessories are featured in their three hundred stores across America. Outside of the states, four companies in Japan produce and market a full range of menswear products under the Alan Flusser label. Mr. Flusser grew up in Essex County, New Jersey. At sixteen and with a one handicap, Alan became the champion of his family’s golf club.  During his high school years, he competed on the metropolitan and national amateur golf circuit. Recruited by one of the country’s premier golf programs at Rollins College, Alan played on the varsity as a freshman. During this period he was privileged to play golf with some of his boyhood idols, namely Sam Snead and Jack Nicklaus. As his father was something of a clotheshorse, Alan likewise developed a keen interest in men’s fashion, holding down part-time jobs in various suburban men’s stores on weekends and holidays throughout his high school years. Ultimately deciding not to pursue golf as a profession, Alan finished up his undergraduate years at Temple University. While playing number one on their golf team, it was not unusual to find Alan sketching new lapel shapers during class to take with him to his tailor. Graduating with a liberal arts degree, he spent time in the real estate and insurance fields, acquiring licenses to practice both. After several years, Alan decided not to join his father’s real estate and insurance business and pursue his lifelong passion of men’s fashion. Mr. Flusser’s first job was as a stylist of boy’s shirts for the Phillips Van Heusen Company in 1971 while in the evenings, he studied textiles at F.I.T. and fashion illustration at Parsons College. After a two-year stint at Van Heusen, he left to become the designer of the newly formed the Relax sportswear division for Pierre Cardin, at the time, the most successful men’s fashion designer. Traveling all over the world, Alan pioneered the development of coordinated sportswear collections in the then unsophisticated markets of Hong Kong, Brazil, and India. In his six years as it’s chief designer, the Pierre Cardin Relax collection grew into a sizable and highly visible force on the American fashion landscape. In 1978,  along with the executive in charge of the sportswear business, Allan Ellinger, he left to start the Alan Flusser business. Although in business less than a year, in 1980 Mr. Flusser was nominated for the prestigious Coty Award, the fashion industry’s Oscar. Bucking precedent, the committee decided to make an exception and waive their requirement of a two-year eligibility. Nominated for the next three years as the country’s top menswear designer, in 1984, Alan was awarded the Coty Award. That same year he was cited in a special NY Times fashion supplement as one of America’s top five menswear designers. By 1986, having authored  two books, Making the Man  and Clothes and the Man, Alan was given a special Cutty Sark award for his “unique contribution to the literature of menswear”. During this period, Mr. Flusser’s reputation began spreading beyond the men’s industry. Two of the decades best selling profiles of the investment banking community,  “Liar’s Poker” and “Barbarians at the Gate” made reference to Mr. Flusser’s custom suits as the choice of the Wall Street cognoscenti. In 1987, Alan attracted national attention for the film wardrobe he designed for Michael Douglas in his academy award-winning role as Gordon Gekko in the movie, Wall Street. Mr. Flusser’s work received further notice for his designs for the HBO movie, Barbarians at the Gate as well as for Al Pacino’s award winning movie Scent of a Woman . In 1988, Alan was placed on the International Best Dressed list as a permanent member. In 1992, the on-camera wardrobe Alan created for Bob Costas as NBC's host of the summer Olympics landed the sports announcer on that year’s list of best-dressed TV personalities. In the fall of 1996, Harper Collins published Mr. Flusser’s third book, Style and the Man. Its successful sale established Alan as the best-selling author in modern menswear history. Over the past twenty years, Alan has contributed articles on men’s style to periodicals all over the world including The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Gentleman’s Quarterly. For several years, Alan authored a monthly column for Men’s Health Magazine. Alan’s latest book on men’s style, Dressing The Man, Mastering The Art of Permanent Fashion was published by Harper Collins in the Fall of 1996. A lavish opus of some three hundred and twenty five pages in full color with two gatefolds plus a thirty-five page glossary, Dressing The Man is considered the most definitive work on the subject. Serialized by both Gentleman’s Quarterly and Departure Magazine, offered for sale in all Ralph Lauren stores, along with Brook Brothers, who broke one hundred and fifty years of private label precedent to create their own specially boxed copy, Dressing the Man has replaced Clothes and the Man as the bible of the menswear industry while surpassing it as the best selling work on the subject. Over the past thirty years, Mr. Flusser has been an active member of a world peace lay Buddhist organization, the Soka Gakkai International. As a non-governmental organization of the United Nations, the S.G.I. promotes peace, education and culture as stepping stones towards individual enlightenment and world peace. Its third president, the scholar and educator Daisaku Ikeda, writes in the forward to his book, The Human Revolution, “ A change in just one person can lead to a change in the destiny of a nation and a change in the destiny for all mankind.” In 1986, Alan was awarded the Seikyo Culture medal for his efforts on behalf of this world wide peace movement and the Min-On Art award in 1988 for his contributions to the fields of art and culture. Mr. Flusser resides in NYC and Southampton and has two grown daughters.