Oleg Cassini, chief designer for Jacqueline Kennedy; 92

NEW YORK -- The magic of Camelot may have had something to do with Oleg Cassini, the designer who created Jacqueline Kennedy's graceful, elegant look.

Mr. Cassini died Friday at age 92 in a Long Island hospital, said his wife, Marianne. She said her husband was hospitalized after complaining of a headache March 11, but that he did not have a stroke.

''He was a tremendous, tremendous person," she said. Mr. Cassini created Jackie Kennedy's Inauguration Day outfit, a fawn-colored wool coat with a sable collar over a matching wool dress, with a pillbox hat from Halston. Try though they might, the work of imitators never quite compared.

''The other ladies wore fur coats, and they looked like bears," he recalled years later.

Mr. Cassini once said that shortly after John F. Kennedy was elected, he persuaded the first lady that she should hire him as the creator of her total look, rather than as one of many designers.The result: Jacqueline Kennedy became the pinnacle of style during the White House years from 1961 to 1963.

''We are on the threshold of a new American elegance thanks to Mrs. Kennedy's beauty, naturalness, understatement, exposure, and symbolism," Mr. Cassini said when his selection was announced.

With the fame of his White House assignment came new business opportunities. Mr. Cassini was one of the first designers to pursue licensing agreements that put his name on a large variety of products, from luggage to nail polish -- even a custom-designed automobile interior in the 1970s. Later, in the 1990s, Mr. Cassini launched a partnership with David's Bridal.

Mr. Cassini, a longtime friend of the Kennedy family, said he created 300 outfits in the less than three years of the Kennedy administration. In his 1995 book, ''A Thousand Days of Magic: Dressing Jacqueline Kennedy for the White House," Mr. Cassini recalled a constant sense of urgency during the White House years.

''All I remember about those days are nerves, and Jackie on the phone: 'Hurry, hurry, Oleg, I've got nothing to wear,' " he wrote.

In the years following Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Cassini saw Jacqueline Kennedy only sporadically. ''It was hard for her to be with people who had been part of her life in the White House," he wrote

When the former first lady died in 1994, Mr. Cassini called her ''a woman of extremely good taste, a marvelous influence in the arts, in furniture, in food and in clothes. . . . She created fashion because she was who she was."

Mr. Cassini was born in 1913 in Paris to wealthy, aristocratic Russian parents who were later forced to flee their homeland after the Revolution. They settled in Italy, their fortune gone, but his mother gained some success as a dressmaker and her son eventually decided to go into the fashion business, too.

He came to the United States in 1936 and held various design jobs in New York before going to Hollywood and landing a job at Paramount in the early 1940s.

Mr. Cassini split his time between his estate in Oyster Bay, N.Y., and a town house in Manhattan.