D. Gorton/The New York Times
David and Joan Helpern in 1978.
David M. Helpern, the business side of the husband-and-wife apparel design team known as Joan & David, who popularized elegant, comfortable — and non-high-heeled — shoes for working women in the 1960s before expanding their line internationally to include clothing, died on May 14 in Westwood, Calif. He was 94.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, Joan Helpern said.
Mr. Helpern, the chief executive of the business, and his wife, the designer and creative director, built their company into a retail preserve of high-quality, moderately priced stylishness beginning in 1967, when Mrs. Helpern designed her first pair of Oxford flats in classic navy blue and white.
“We had noticed that women were running through airports,” Mrs. Helpern said in an interview on Thursday. “We decided to make shoes for women who run through airports.”
The couple brought disparate backgrounds to the project. She was a child psychologist for the New York City schools with a yen for style. He was the scion of a family clothing business — his father had helped found the Boston-based Touraine women’s apparel stores — who much preferred travel and history, which he had studied at Harvard.
Drawing on their travels together, as well as his retail background and her instinct about the limited appeal of high heels in a post-Betty Friedan world, the Helperns found a small factory in Italy willing to produce her Oxfords. The shoes sold well in the United States; she went on to design many other shoes, and by 1990 the Joan & David label appeared in men’s and women’s apparel of all kinds sold in more than 100 outlets in the United States and Europe, including Ann Taylor, Neiman Marcus and the Helperns’ own Joan & David boutiques.
“Disappointment has a good side,” Mr. Helpern told The Boston Globe in 1989, referring to the discontent he once felt working in his father’s business. “It can create a challenge. Nobody who has succeeded is a stranger to failure.”
The Helperns sold their company and the rights to the Joan & David label in 2000 after a series of business reversals.
David Moses Helpern was born in Brookline, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1917, the middle of five children of Rose and Myron Helpern. The elder Mr. Helpern and a brother founded the first Touraine’s women’s store in the 1920s. The company, which expanded to 17 stores, was sold in 1970.
David Helpern graduated from Harvard in 1938. In 1960 he was a widower with a young son when he married Joan Marshall. Besides his wife, he is survived by the son, David Jr., and a daughter from his second marriage, Elizabeth Helpern Lass. David and Joan Helpern legally separated in 1998.
“I was told women were married to high heels,” Mr. Helpern said in 1989. “I was told that soft, unstructured, lightweight shoes wouldn’t sell. People laughed. Especially the New England shoe manufacturers, who told me I’d be skinned alive.”
He added: “We’ve simplified dressing. That’s the American idea.”
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