Ben Kluger, L.A. Apparel Pioneer, Dies at 86

Ben Kluger, one of the pioneers of the modern Los Angeles apparel business, who founded and operated Ben Kluger Trimming Co. and its successor companies for more than half a century in the downtown Fashion District, died of cancer on Feb. 10 in Studio City. He was 86.

Kluger was born in 1914 in Montreal, Canada, to parents who were immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, a junk collector, moved his young family to Los Angeles in 1919. Kluger quit school at the age of 13 and took a job as a delivery boy in the same garment factory where his sister worked as a sewing machine operator. Later, as a young man, he became a junior salesman for a company that supplied thread and buttons to garment manufacturers.

In 1937, shortly after he got married, he took $582 and founded Ben Kluger Trimming Co., which also sold buttons, threads and other supplies to apparel makers. The company later became Ben Kluger Co., then was renamed Ben Kluger & Associates; from 1963 until 1992 when it was sold, Kluger ran the company with his son, Lance. The company that he had started during the Great Depression began, after the Second World War, to specialize in the sale of Pellon, a nonwoven textile used as a synthetic lining for collars and cuffs.

The Klugers maintained a factory in the heart of the Fashion District for most of the company’s existence; but in 1985 they bought property in the Central City Enterprise Zone at Maple and 28th streets, where the city had promised tax breaks, low-interest financing and other incentives to businesses that would invest and relocate there. Local residents opposed the factory, however, and the Klugers were unable to go ahead with construction. Eventually, they built the factory in another part of the city, but only after they lost their Enterprise Zone investment. In 1992, the Klugers’ company was sold to Freudenberg Nonwovens USA, which renamed the company Pellon Sales-West.

Kluger helped found the Downtown Property Owners Association in 1996, partly as a result of his experience with the Enterprise Zone debacle, according to his son.

Ben Kluger witnessed many technological and structural changes in the apparel business over the decades, but he continued to believe that it was a people business above all, even though the national character of the people in it kept changing, too, his son told California Apparel News.

“He saw the industry change from the early ’30s,” Lance Kluger said. “The most interesting change, he used to say, was in the cultural makeup [of the apparel business]. Now, there are more and more Koreans and Persians; in the early ’30s, there were more Eastern Europeans.”

Ben Kluger is survived by Gloria Kluger, his wife of 37 years; Lance Kluger, his son; Mina Lewin, his sister; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. —Louis Chunovic