Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter passed away peacefully on March 29, 2023 at the age of 99. She is survived by her two sons, Robert and Ronald, her daughters-in-law, Wendi and Ellen, her three granddaughters, Ilana, Chloe, and Aliza, and her great grandchildren, Jacob and Aviva. Hedda had boundless energy and a genuine love for people, especially her family and closest friends. She was incredibly modest but kind and enchanting. She was a loving and generous force for good in the world, a unique soul, and will be sorely missed by all those who were privileged to know her.
Hedda was born in Vienna, Austria, and narrowly escaped the Holocaust by securing passage to Cuba and then Brooklyn a few years later. Her story has been memorialized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and while her identity as a holocaust survivor was not a part of her daily experience, it certainly informed her personality as a resilient, creative optimist for her entire life.
When Hedda’s family arrived in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, her father opened a small fur store called Kleinfeld. It was there that Hedda met her beloved partner of 67 years, Jack Schachter, who had a knack for cutting furs and was a favorite employee of her father. Hedda and Jack were married, and the store became Kleinfeld and Son. Hedda and Jack made an exceptional team, and together, they expanded the scope of Kleinfeld’s to include coats, suits, cocktail dresses, and later bridal.
Before there was SAY YES TO THE DRESS, there was Miss Hedda. “Miss Hedda” was a legend in the field of bridal because she took the sleepy respectable field of nuptial adornments and created a fashion-driven world of dreams, and built the largest bridal salon in the world.
As the buyer for the store, Hedda would frequent the 7th Avenue showrooms of young designers like Calvin Klein and would charm them all. She had incredible vision, contagious energy, and a charming Viennese accent. She cared about fashion as well as the artists in the field. When she started the bridal department, she asked why they were not designing bridal, and soon they were, and Kleinfeld’sshowed them exclusively. The field started exploding. Hedda had the uncanny ability to see what fashion would be the next year and was always ahead of the curve. She was the first person in the field to bring gowns from Europe, and is responsible or the field of bridal being what it is today.
