The Dresser.(The Talk of the Town)(Arnold Scaasi)

Last summer, Arnold Scaasi, the septuagenarian fashion designer, received a phone call from the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, informing him of a forthcoming exhibition, titled "First Ladies and Fashion," that was to focus exclusively upon his creations. "I didn't even know there was an Abraham Lincoln museum in Fort Wayne, so this was a lovely surprise," Scaasi explained the other afternoon, perched under a Picasso in the drawing room of his duplex on Beekman Place. Scaasi was tan--he has a place in Palm Beach--with blond hair cut into wingy bangs.

Thus far in his career, Scaasi--who began life in Montreal as Arnold Isaacs and, upon entering the fashion business, reversed the spelling of his last name to Italianate effect--has made clothes for five First Ladies: the Mesdames Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Scaasi's first visit to the White House was in 1958, for a tea with Mamie Eisenhower. "Have you been to the White House? You really should go--it is fabulous," he said. The wife of the thirty-fourth President, he recalled, was "perfectly charming, and very good-looking, and she had beautiful skin." Scaasi was summoned back for a fitting months later, whereupon he discovered that Mrs. Eisenhower preferred to go without a bra--less a proto-feminist gesture than a personal verdict on the ideal fifties bustline. "In those days, they were very pulled up and pushed out, so it made a lot of creases near the armhole," Scaasi explained. "She didn't want to have those ugly creases."

Jacqueline Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower's successor, was an established customer of Scaasi's ready-to-wear collection, sold at Bergdorf Goodman, but he never got to see her in her underwear in the White House. Not long after President Kennedy's inauguration, Scaasi did receive a call from the First Lady's office with a request for some of his recent styles. "I said, 'We will only charge her wholesale, not retail, just as we did with Mrs. Eisenhower,' " he recalled. "There was a pause, and the young woman at the other end of the line said, 'I don't think Mrs. Kennedy pays for her clothes.' " (The gig went to Oleg Cassini.)

Scaasi returned to action during the first Bush Presidency, when he was charged with making the Silver Fox more foxy. Scaasi has a particular fondness for Barbara Bush, who, he reveals in his memoir, ...