Doris Fisher, co-founder of the Gap, dies at 94 in San Francisco – SFGATE

Doris Fisher, co-founder of the iconic clothing retailer Gap, which opened its first store on Ocean Avenue in 1969, died over the weekend in San Francisco surrounded by her family, according to a news release from the company. She was 94 years old. 

“Many of us were fortunate to have known Doris personally, an extraordinary human being whose brilliance, quiet determination, and heart shaped everything from Gap Inc.’s indelible influence on fashion and retail to philanthropy and the San Francisco art scene,” CEO Richard Dickson said in an email shared with employees on Monday morning.

Born Doris Feigenbaum in 1931, Fisher attended the Katherine Delmar Burke School for girls in San Francisco and later graduated from Stanford University with a degree in economics in 1953. That was the same year she married her husband Don, whose family she had known for years.

The couple hatched the idea for the company when Don, at the time a real estate developer, couldn’t find a pair of Levi’s that fit him. He and Doris began scouring San Francisco department stores for his 31-inch inseam, finding all of them sold only jeans in even-numbered sizes, according to his biography on Philanthropy Roundtable.

“What if,” he wondered, “someone put together in one store all the styles, colors, and sizes Levi Strauss had to offer?”

It was Doris who suggested the name, a reference to the “generation gap” and younger people they hoped to draw in. The first Gap was born, selling Levi’s and records out of a humble Ingleside storefront that launched into a $16 billion fashion empire. The company expanded with sister brands Banana Republic and Old Navy as outposts opened in nearly every shopping mall throughout the U.S. At its peak around 2005, there were over 3,500 stores across the world.

Gap changed not only the way people shopped, with its specialty retail concept focused on neatly organized rows of merchandise that never went out of stock, but also how they dressed, as it fostered a trend of casual wear essentials like jeans, pocket tees, khakis and corduroys. The Fishers were equal partners in the business: Don was the company’s fashion merchandiser and corporate director, while Doris was at the helm of advertising and product development, quietly shaping how the clothing brand was perceived by its customers. (Don died in 2009.) 

“We must have complete knowledge of what we want to stand for in our business,” she once said, per her obituary. “That will make our store sing with excitement for the type of customer we want to appeal to — and have complete awareness as to our customers’ needs.”

Fisher was also remembered as a champion of the arts and a philanthropist. She and her husband reportedly amassed one of the largest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the country, pledging more than 1,100 works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2009 along with a $250 million gift. (The museum recently opened the transformed galleries, “Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10.”) 

Outside of museums, the Fishers commissioned and installed “Cupid’s Span,” the massive bow-and-arrow sculpture on the Embarcadero, in 2002. The couple also donated more than $70 million to the Knowledge Is Power Program, which operates 279 tuition-free charter schools that serve hundreds of thousands of students in the U.S. 

Family members described her personality as warm, focused and quiet, as she preferred a private life. On her 90th birthday in 2021, then-CEO Sonia Syngal called Fisher the company’s “first working mom and original arbiter of cool” who “captured the American zeitgeist and set the stage for the brand to become the cultural icon it is today.” 

Fisher is survived by three sons, Robert J. Fisher, William S. Fisher and Athletics owner John J. Fisher, as well as 10 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the KIPP Foundation Northern California.