Koos van den Akker, Inventor of the Cosby Sweater, Has Died at Age 75

Credit: Ron Galella Ltd./WireImage

Koos van den Akker, the Dutch-born, New York-based fashion designer best known for bringing the infamous "Cosby sweater" into the world (and spawning many imitators--check your uncle’s closet), passed away from colon cancer two weeks ago at age 75.

He was, according to The New York Times, conflicted about his most famous legacy:

It was Ms. [Josephine] Premice who asked him to design a sweater as a gift for her friend Mr. Cosby, who liked it so much that he ordered more, each one of a kind, and wore them on ’The Cosby Show.’ Mr. van den Akker himself had misgivings about his creations. The sweaters -- dizzying riots of shapes and colors -- toed ’a very thin line between absolutely awful and something of genius,’ the designer told > Vice magazine in a 2012 video interview. Mr. Cosby said in a telephone interview last Thursday that the sweaters ’were works of art whether you liked them or not.’

’I have purchased and worn approximately 14 of his works of art,’ he said.

It seems redundant to call something the "end of an era" when said era is already firmly in the past (Bill Cosby didn’t need any help disemboweling his own legacy), but it does feel oddly symbolic that the designer of Cosby’s iconic sartorial calling card literally died within months of Cosby’s professional demise.

Regardless, of course, van den Akker was more than just the king of gaudy sweaters, and deserves remembrance divorced from his famously disgraced client.

Writing in > The New York Times in 1980, Angela Taylor called Mr. van den Akker ’the designer for the woman who is bored with classics and has the style to wear the unusual.’

Van den Akker did what he loved until the end:

Mr. van den Akker considered himself a craftsman. He was most content working behind a sewing machine, which was where he had remained, at his studio in the garment district, until he fell and was taken to Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital three weeks before he died. ’He died over a sewing machine, figuratively,’ Mrs. Meunier said. ’That is what he always wished, to sew until the end.’

Deepest condolences to his family and friends.

I shall power-clash extra hard today in his honor.