Background
Mr. Hoving was born in Stockholm, the son of Johannes Hoving, a surgeon and Helga Rundberg, an opera singer. He was brought to the United States with his parents in 1903 and attended the Barnard School and De Witt Clinton High School in New York City. He received a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1920. At Brown, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
In 1924, he went to work for R. H. Macy & Company in the training program and was an immediate success. By the age of 30, he was a vice president. He also underwent his own training program to polish his knowledge of the arts. For four years, he took courses at the Metropolitan Museum in subjects like painting, textile design, old silver and furniture.
When he went to Montgomery Ward & Company as vice president in charge of sales in 1932, he set up a bureau of design to overhaul Ward's Catalogue. He left the mail-order house in 1936 to go to Lord & Taylor, where he was president until 1946.
Hoving continued to stress the great importance of design, reportedly asking job-seekers to choose between well and badly designed objects and hiring them or rejecting them on the basis of their taste. In 1946 he founded the Hoving Corporation, whose properties came to include Bonwit Teller, the department store, until he sold it in 1960.
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