Shamask

Born in Amsterdam in 1945, Ronaldus Shamask was raised in Australia and spent his early 20s in London. Though trained as an architect, he worked as a fashion illustrator for English newspapers, studied stage design, and painted. He came to the U.S. in 1972 and, in partnership with Murray Moss six years later, a fashion label was born: Shamask. It closed after 12 years, and while Mr. Moss went on to open Moss in New York's SoHo district—a retail store known for its pitch-perfect inventory of industrial design—Mr. Shamask, in 1996, began a new fashion business of his own, this time in uppercase: SHAMASK. Today, the label has a devoted following of women who admire the precision and flow of its clothing and its cerebral sense of drape and scale.