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obituary | October 8, 2003 Eleanor Lambert, Empress of Fashion, Dies at 100

By ENID NEMY

Eleanor Lambert, whose tireless promotion of American fashion gave the industry an international presence and helped to elevate it from rag trade to respectability, died yesterday at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 100.

Often referred to as the Empress of Seventh Avenue, Miss Lambert looked the part with her trademark turbans and outsize jewelry. Her barrage of news releases and enthusiastic work as a publicity agent did much to further the careers of numerous American designers, among them Norman Norell, Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta and Anne Klein.

Miss Lambert, who founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1962 and ran it for more than a decade, had an almost unerring eye for recognizing future stars: Halston was one of them.

As might be expected, she had both admirers and detractors.

Her conviction that American fashion was important led her into skirmishes with the editors of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, who in the 1940's and 50's concentrated on Paris as the capital of the fashion universe and on its designers as the leaders. As she began to make American designers better known, however, the influential magazines gradually began to cover them.

''Her motto always was 'Don't look back,' '' said John Loring, a longtime friend and the design director and a senior vice president of Tiffany & Company. ''There were no rehashes or post-mortems. She didn't care a hoot about what was over, triumphs as well as defeats. And she not only wouldn't take no for an answer, she didn't hear it. Throw her out through the front door, and she'd fly back through the transom.''

In 1973, in a highlight of her career, she produced a landmark fashion show at the Palace of Versailles. To the astonishment of many of those present, the five American designers who were showing outshined the five designers from France. The Americans were Mr. Blass, Mr. de la Renta, Halston, Miss Klein and Stephen Burrows; the French designers were Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro and Marc Bohan for Christian Dior. The success of the Americans helped further the reputation of American design.

Many of the innovations Miss Lambert introduced more than a half-century ago are an accepted part of the fashion industry, some in their original form and others revamped and revitalized. For example, in the early 1940's she originated the International Best-Dressed List, an expanded version of a Paris best-dressed list that was suspended during World War II. Although it has lost a good deal of its luster, it remains a coveted honor among women who are serious about fashion and who are backed by serious bank accounts. Nominations are made annually by fashion editors, many of whom have never set eyes on the women they are judging, and the list is then compiled by a smaller panel of editors and people of fashion. She handed control of the list to editors of Vanity Fair in 2002.

Miss Lambert's creation of the Council of Fashion Designers of America was the first attempt to bring together often warring designers, enabling them to present a united voice on issues that affected them and not incidentally to enhance their prestige.

In the 1970's, her influence within the council declined as the designers themselves became increasingly active in the association. By the 1980's, the council's activities had become glittery, with huge black-tie events and glamorous personalities whose only connections to fashion were that they wore clothes. Relevance was added in the 1990's, however, with Seventh on Sale, a benefit for AIDS research.

The prestigious Coty Fashion Critics Awards for design excellence, sponsored by Coty fragrances, were created by Miss Lambert in 1943 and were presented for more than 30 years. But as more designers began to market their own fragrances, they became increasingly unwilling to promote the Coty name. The awards were discontinued when Coty was bought by Pfizer, and in 1981 they evolved into the C.F.D.A. Awards, considered the Oscars of the fashion industry.

The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was another of Miss Lambert's projects. She was one of its early supporters after its creation in 1937 as a repository for important design trends, and she remained involved with it for many years.

In the 1940's, as the press director of the New York Dress Institute, Miss Lambert introduced the concept of fashion weeks, held twice a year in New York, to replace what had been uncoordinated showings by designers. Most of the important fashion and accessory designers took part, and the grouping of their individual shows enabled American and international fashion writers to cover the industry in a condensed period.

Although there were back-to-back shows both day and evening, the week was not unalloyed work for the writers; social events, sponsored by fashion personalities, were interspersed. The fashion weeks paved the way for today's centralized fashion shows, here and abroad. And Miss Lambert's own Sunday lunch, held in her spacious Fifth Avenue apartment at the beginning of the week for out-of-town fashion reporters and a group of her New York friends, was a tradition until several years before her death. After they stopped, she did continue her Saturday movie-and-dinner evenings for a rotating group of friends.

She credited her energy and youthful spirit in part to numerous visits over the years to a clinic in Germany where she was given live-cell therapy treatment.

Mr. Loring of Tiffany attributed her ''promotional know-how and her love of events'' to her father, Clay Lambert, a circus advance man. Mr. Loring, whose great-grandfather owned a circus, said he recognized circus artistry in Miss Lambert's ability ''to attract crowds and always display the next trick.''

In addition to her involvement with fashion in this country, Miss Lambert produced shows of American fashion in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Britain, Australia and the former Soviet Union, under the auspices of the Commerce and State Departments. In 1965, she was one of President Johnson's first appointees to the National Council on the Arts. She was, too, an early publicity agent for European designers like Valentino and Pierre Cardin, and she did much to help their reputations in the United States. In her later years, she also took on a number of socialites (always well dressed) as clients.

Miss Lambert gave up her office just a year before her death but still kept busy with a few accounts. ''I still have all my marbles,'' she said. ''I don't want to sit around waiting to die.''

Miss Lambert's first marriage, to Willis Conner, an architect, in the 1920's, ended in divorce. In 1936, she married Seymour Berkson, a journalist and newspaper executive at the Hearst Corporation, who died in 1959. She is survived by a son, William Berkson, of San Francisco; a grandson and a granddaughter; and two great-granddaughters.

Miss Lambert was born in Crawfordsville, Ind., on Aug. 10, 1903, and attended the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis and the Chicago Art Institute before moving to New York in 1925. After a brief period with a Manhattan advertising agency, she became the press director of the infant Whitney Museum of American Art, and later she helped to establish the Art Dealers Association of America. Her conviction that clothing design is an art form led to her concentration on fashion promotion. The sculptor Isamu Noguchi was an early client.

She had not always juxtaposed clothing and art. ''I still remember buying my first party dress,'' she recalled in a 1993 interview. ''It was yellow,'' she said, and it had black velvet ribbons on the sleeve. ''I looked like Chicken Little in it, and I thought I was the cat's meow.''

Photos: Eleanor Lambert, at left in 1963 and above in 2002, was ever clad in turbans during a career devoted to elevating American fashion. She had an almost unerring eye for recognizing future stars.

#Elenor Lamber #New York Society #PR #Publicity #Icons #Best Dressed #New York Women #Style

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shewasaverystylishgirl · 13 years

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Obituary Published: August 23, 1989 | Diana Vreeland, Editor, Dies; Voice of Fashion for Decades

By BERNADINE MORRIS Published: August 23, 1989

Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor and creator of spectacular fashion exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, died of a heart attack yesterday at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was believed to be in her late 80's and had been in failing health for several years.

In the more than 40 years that she was associated with the fashion world, she was called an oracle, the high priestess of fashion, a myth maker. She was the fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar from 1937 to 1962, when she moved to Vogue. There, she was editor in chief until 1971.

Instead of resting on her laurels, she went on, as consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to a new career of staging annual fashion exhibitions that drew almost one million visitors a year and made the museum a center of fashion excitement for New York City and the world.

''She was and remains the only genius fashion editor,'' Richard Avedon, the photographer, said yesterday. Their professional relationship at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue was the inspiration for the movie ''Funny Face'' starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn.

Despite a predilection for aristocratic luxury that recalled the gracious days before World War I, she had an innate understanding of the extraordinary pace of change in 20th-century life. She had an eye for what was new and imaginative, and many fashion designers say she gave them a crucial boost at an early stage in their career.

Her sense of theater was evidenced in the way she moved - Cecil Beaton described her as ''an elegant crane picking her way out of a swamp'' -and the way she looked. Her cheeks and ear lobes were rouged, her lips and nails colored a clear red and her hair lacquered black until the end of her life.

She was fashionably thin, and her favorite costume when she was working or partygoing was narrow black pants with either a black turtleneck sweater or elaborate tunic, depending on the occasion. For years she wore her hair in a snood - it became a kind of trademark - and wore ankle-strap low-heel sandals.

She was born around the turn of the century in Paris - she was never very specific about her birth date - to the former Emily Key Hoffman, an American, and her husband, Frederick Y. Dalziel, who was Scottish. She had a younger sister, Alexandra.

''We went to Venice or Deauville in the summer or wherever everybody else went,'' she said of her childhood in Europe. ''Our parents spent their days having a good time. They never contributed a bloody thing and they and all our friends lived the life of Riley.'' Ballet and Riding

In 1914, spurred by the onset of the war, the family moved to New York, where the Dalziel sisters went to ballet classes three times a week, learned to ride from Buffalo Bill Cody and occasionally attended schools such as Brearley for a few months. Diana Dalziel made her debut in 1922, and two years later, while vacationing in Saratoga, met and married T. Reed Vreeland, a banker who graduated from Yale the year she came out.

They lived in Albany for four years and had two sons, Thomas R. Vreeland Jr., who became an architect, and Frederick, who entered the diplomatic service. Then they moved to Europe, where for a brief time Diana Vreeland ran a lingerie shop in London. When they returned to the United States in 1936, she began writing a column for Harper's Bazaar called ''Why Don't You . . . .''

For a country in the midst of a Depression, it offered such heady suggestions as ''Why don't you put all your dogs in bright yellow collars and leads like all the dogs in Paris?'' or ''have a furry elk-hide trunk for the back of your car?'' It was widely satirized and widely read and the next year she was made fashion editor of the magazine. Made a Few Mistakes

During most of the 1960's, when fashion was in turmoil, she presided over Vogue magazine, where the fashion world took everything she said seriously and where she made a few apparent mistakes, such as having experimental photographs taken with a wide-angle lens that distorted the models, giving them big heads and tiny feet. Nevertheless, fashion photographers were widely influenced by those pictures and began trying to see what their lenses could do.

She breakfasted on tea and oatmeal, worked in bed in the mornings and showed up in her office around noon.

Her legend grew as her aphorisms were circulated within the fashion world. ''Pink,'' she said, ''is the navy blue of India.'' ''The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb.'' She pronounced Celanese, the American fabric company, as if it were Italian: chelahnayzay, and broke down corduroy to its original components: cord du roi.

She avoided the typewriter. ''Has anyone ever written a great love letter on a typewriter?'' she asked. ''A great suicide note?'' And she made pronouncements. Of Chanel, she said, ''her first customers were princesses and duchesses and she dressed them like secretaries and stenographers.''

During this period, she asked Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, who was working in plastics and sculpture, to make accessories and then clothes.

''She sent me to Arizona,'' he said, ''with Veruschka, the model, four suitcases full of fabrics, wires and tape and told me to wrap and tie everything as I wanted and then she gave me eight pages in the magazine.'' Two Job Opportunities

When Oscar de la Renta came to New York from Paris with a letter of introduction, she invited him to tea. He had two job opportunities, he told her, one doing custom clothes for Elizabeth Arden, the other designing ready-to-wear for Christian Dior-New York.

''What do you want to do with yourself?'' she asked.

''I want to get into ready-to-wear because that's where the money is,'' he told her.

''Then go to Arden because you will make your reputation faster,'' she advised. ''She is not a designer, so she will promote you. At the other place, you will always be eclipsed by the name of Dior.''

''That is exactly what happened,'' he said. ''And when I did go into ready-to-wear, she helped me. When I made all those gypsy clothes and the caftans in 1967, 1968, it was all Diana's suggestions.''

She had a sense of fantasy that enveloped both her own image and her friends.

''Her thought process was very original,'' said Bill Blass, who became a friend of Mrs. Vreeland and her husband, who died in 1966. ''She always insisted I was British, no matter how many times I told her I was a hoosier from Indiana,'' Mr. Blass said. Last Career With Museum

Her last career, with the Metropolitan Museum, began in 1973 with a retrospective showing of Balenciaga's clothes, from his first collection in 1938 to the wedding dress he made in 1972 for the Duchess of Cadiz, General Francisco Franco's granddaughter, a month before he died.

The same year, she pulled together an exhibition called Innovative Designers in Paris, and each year there followed another eye-catcher that drew not only fashion enthusiasts but also people captivated by the color and drama of romantic Hollywood clothes, stylish American women (including Irene Castle, Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker and Elsie de Wolfe), Russian peasants, the costumes of the Ballets Russes, fashions of the Hapsburg era, Yves Saint Laurent's designs, equestrian costumes, Chinese mandarin robes and dance clothes throughout history.

The parties that heralded the openings each fall became major New York events where figures prominent in art, social and fashion circles mingled for dinner and dancing in the museum; the evening was capped by a stroll through the exotically lighted display halls with appropriate music and the flash of photographers' lights. Mrs. Vreeland was in the center of the action at all the parties except the one for ''Dance'' in 1986, when her health was too fragile. 'Elegance Is Innate'

During the museum period, Mrs. Vreeland became the undisputed voice of the fashion world, and her presence at other parties and fashion openings was eagerly sought. She received awards from such diverse groups as the Italian fashion industry and the Rhode Island School of Design and she became a chevalier of the French National Order of Merit.

In a book of her favorite photographs and sketches edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and published by Doubleday in 1980, she continued her penchant for aphorisms. ''Elegance is innate,'' she wrote. ''It has nothing to do with being well dressed.'' She also said, ''I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity.''

In her memoirs, ''D. V.,'' published in 1984 by Alfred A. Knopf, she did not restrict her pronouncements to fashion. ''Chutney is marvelous,'' she wrote. ''I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial.'' And ''lettuce is divine, although I'm not sure it's really food.'' A Practical Slant

Sometimes her observations had a remarkably practical slant. ''Whatever the fashion,'' she wrote in The New York Times in 1977, ''the important thing is time for upkeep. We take it for granted that a girl gets the best she can for herself. But, if she doesn't keep it up, if it isn't in beautiful condition, if the shoes aren't cleaned before she wears them every day and her bag isn't cleaned and everything in it cleaned, she'll never look like anything.''

She was an early enthusiast on the subject of keeping fit, and the magazines she edited were filled with articles on exercise, skin and hair care and grooming long before these topics became major obsessions.

''The body must stay fit,'' she once explained. ''Fit people like themselves much better.''

The woman who was sometimes described as having the profile of a cigar-store Indian told an interviewer once that ''you don't have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive,'' and her friends insist that she carried this maxim out in her own life.

''Dinner alone with D. V. was one of the best ways I could think of to spend an evening,'' said Bill Blass.

She lived in a basically red apartment on Park Avenue decorated by Billy Baldwin with lots of pictures, patterns, bibelots and calculated clutter. When she was editor in chief at Vogue, she also had her office painted bright red. Link to Aristocratic Years

As fashion became more egalitarian during the later years of the 20th century, Diana Vreeland provided a link to the aristocratic years when it was the province exclusively of the very rich. At a time when most people were concerned with the practical qualities of synthetic fibers, she could speak of ''the feel of a perfect piece of silk'' as the ''greatest projection of pleasure.''

She had the theatrical knack of a Diaghilev, whom she greatly admired and whom she made the subject of one of her Metropolitan Museum exhibits along with the costumes for his Ballets Russes. For the increasingly computerized fashion industry, she was a symbol of the grandeur of the past when drama and imagination were all. She had a glimpse of that past in her early years in Europe. In recreating it in her later life, she smoothed out the bumps and made it seem more exhilarating than perhaps it ever was.

She is survived by her two sons, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be private. A memorial service is planned for the fall, with the date to be announced later.

#Diana Vreeland #Obituary #Fashion #Vogue

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