Doris Fisher

Gap co-founder and ‘original arbiter of cool’ who created the brand that would epitomise 1990s fashion

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Doris Fisher and husband Don outside a Gap store in 1973. Gap

It was the uniform of late-20th-century America. A clothing empire that at its peak was worth $16bn and had 3,500 shops selling simple, crisp casualwear — denim, chinos, khaki, T-shirts — was founded by a couple in San Francisco in 1969 because Doris Fisher’s husband, Don, couldn’t find trousers that fit him.

For four decades, as Gap’s chief fashion merchandiser, no product was launched without Doris’s approval and she knew what young people wanted. Even if she complained to her son in her 80s that teens wore their trousers too low-slung for her taste.

On Doris’s 90th birthday, the company’s chief executive called her “the original arbiter of cool”. She also came up with the name. Don, whose original vision was to sell records alongside trousers, wanted to call their shop Pants and Discs; Doris, inspired by a conversation at a cocktail party about the differences between the generations, convinced him to go for something snappier: The Gap.