New York ? Geoffrey Beene, the award-winning designer whose simple, classic styles for men and women put him at the forefront of American fashion, died Tuesday at 77.

Beene died at his home of complications of pneumonia, according to Russell Nardozza, vice president of Geoffrey Beene Inc.

The designer launched his own company on a shoestring budget in 1963 and turned it into a fashion empire. Along with Bill Blass, Beene was regarded as one of the godfathers of American sportswear.

Beene, who had planned to be a doctor and found himself daydreaming instead about fashion, was an eight-time winner of the Coty Fashion Critics Award and the first American designer to show his clothes in Milan. He was widely hailed for his innovative and iconoclastic work.

“A designer’s designer, Geoffrey Beene is one of the most artistic and individual of fashion’s creators,” read the plaque given to him on New York’s Fashion Center Walk of Fame. A 1993 New York Times article described him as “an artist who chooses to work in cloth.”

“The more you learn about clothes, the more you realize what has to be left off,” he once said. “Simplification becomes a very complicated procedure.”

In 1963, Beene opened his own company in a champagne-colored showroom on Seventh Avenue, and the business was an instant success. In its first year, Geoffrey Beene Inc. sold $500,000 worth of clothes, a figure that would quadruple in just two years. The next year he won the first of his Coty Awards.

“He was a quiet gentleman, but he had this uncompromising and liberating attitude toward clothes,” said Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.