Page Turner: Van Day Truex

The un-wiki-able man, and referred to as one of the Twentieth
Century'smost invisible design talents.  Amazon Says . . .

"Van Day Truex was born in Kansas, the artistically inclined son of a stern and intolerant shop manager.  After the seemingly obligatory stint living with a sympathetic and worldly aunt in Wisconsin, he escaped to New York City and design school (quite against his parent's wishes), turning in a stellar performance at the institution that would become Parsons School of Design and immediately earning the notoriously hard-won approval of none other than Frank Alvah Parsons.  

Several hundred society introductions, garden parties, and black-and-white balls later, Truex found himself at the center of the international elite, one of the social register's most sought-after interior designers -- not to mention one of the most prized dinner guests in New York and on the Riviera.

As an enormously popular instructor at Parsons, and the school's president from 1942 to 1952, Truex influenced American interior design far beyond the rarefied circles of his friends and clients -- Brooke Astor, Lady Mendl, Grace Bingham, and the like.  And as director of design at Tiffany & Co. from 1955 to 1962, arguably the store's heyday, Truex indeed had a hand in defining upper-class taste -- he called it "design judgement" -- or at least what went into place settings on the dining tables of the very wealthy.  Many of the designs Truex commissioned and developed for Tiffany's are still sold today as classics of the brand: the all-over wild strawberry china pattern, for example."