Content area
Full Text
SA Legend Jack Mulqueen Dead at 69
NEW YORK
-- Jack Mulqueen, one of the last of the true outsized characters of Seventh Avenue, died peacefully at his home on Wednesday at age 69.
The cause of death was liver cancer, which had been diagnosed earlier in the year.
Mulqueen, a fast-thinking, mischievous visionary, was at his height the charming king of the copyists on Seventh Avenue. While other manufacturers preferred to be discreet about their knockoffs, he swaggered about his, boasting in 1981 that he had bought a $610 Chlo(c) blouse at Saks Fifth Avenue and copied it for his Silk Fashion Group to wholesale for $48.
His unabashed approach won him a splashy lifestyle that included such assets as a silver Maserati, a white Ferrari, a silver Rolls Royce, a 38-foot Rybovich Sport Fisherman boat docked in Palm Beach and an apartment on Sutton Place in Manhattan. He "gambled in Monte Carlo, shopped on Savile Row and dined at Maxim's," he said. A regular among New York's nightlife, he was known as Fast Jack, profiled in French Vogue as "un roi de la soie," and said in 1981, "I don't cut in dozens or grosses. I cut tonnage."
A big dreamer with a sharp, analytical mind and a highly accomplished sailor, John Anthony Patrick Mulqueen was a native New Yorker. His father owned a trucking company and he went...