long live kal; Up and down Seventh Avenue and all along the Great White Way, Bloomingdale's creative force Kal Ruttenstein was beloved for his enthusiastic contributions to fashion and the arts.

Byline: William Norwich

The news that Bloomingdale's beloved fashion director, Kal Ruttenstein, had died was met with great sadness and disbelief in December. How could such a bright, eternal front-row presence be dimmed so suddenly?

Complications from cancer? Wasn't Kal just recently spotted with Sean John Combs, celebrating Diddy's women's collection? And wasn't Kal wearing one of his favorite Sean John tracksuits and jolly sneakers, his preferred choice in footwear (like the pair Kal wore when he met Diana, the Princess of Wales, causing her to remark, "Where did you get your lovely silver trainers?" To which Kal famously blurted out, "They're Chippies")?

Kal and his signatures. The hand-held battery-operated fan when things got too toasty in the front row. Kal rebounding after a stroke in 1997, using a cane customized for him by the artist Chuck Price. Kal's nickname from fashion girls like Elizabeth Saltzman: "baby doll." Kal's perennial perch at Schiller's, Balthazar, Freeman's-any of the popular restaurants this devoted trend-hound helped put on the map-not to be seen but to see.

"It is the end of an era," Marc Jacobs said.

"Kal understood us as designers, and then he could explain us to the consumer," Donna Karan told a reporter.

Kal was a gentle giant on a bridge between creation and customer, and between the customers and every person, place, and thing he considered fashionable, interesting. He was a retail powerhouse who bestowed his magic through prime retail space and Lexington Avenue window displays, offering designers kindly comments and consolation, persuading Bloomingdale's buyers to support his enthusiasms-in-store mini-boutiques inspired by Broadway shows like Hairspray or Rent, which Kal claimed to have seen 33 times-and ringing up members of the press to rave about everything from Zac Posen's latest collection to peasant tops to corsets. Once, after he saw the film Moulin Rouge! at an early screening, he insisted Bloomingdale's order a full stock of corsets.