Gloria Vanderbilt: A Life in Vogue

Laird Borrelli-Persson

Gloria Vanderbilt: A Life in Vogue

“When Miss Gloria Laura Vanderbilt married Mr. Pasquale DiCicco in California last month, she wore a wedding dress by Howard Greer, who also designed her trousseau. She is dark and beautiful, 17 years old, daughter of the late Reginald C. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Vanderbilt, and great-great-granddaughter of the famous Commodore Vanderbilt, founder of the clan.”
“Mrs. Stokowski, the former Gloria Vanderbilt, and the wife of the famous conductor, has a strange beauty, slanting eyes—and an entirely new look since she cropped her famous long, black hair to a short scalloped coiffure. She is the mother of two small sons; a painter—holding her first professional exhibition in May; and among other activities is working for the Moonlight Mist Ball, to be given April 30 by Princess Gourielli, for the benefit of the New York Cancer Committee. Here, she wears a dotted silk foulard dress, with a lifting collar, designed by Leslie Morris, at Bergdorf Goodman.”
“Tall, dark-haired, with camellia-white skin and a magnificent figure, Miss Vanderbilt wears clothes superbly, brings to fashion talent, enjoyment, a sense of drama, a feeling for colour—all, endowments that also power her career as an actress, and her other enthusiasms, writing and painting. About a year ago she started buying clothes at Mainbocher, now is hopelessly (and quite happily) enmeshed in the Mainbocher dharma. ‘To go there for a fitting is really like a ballet,’ she said recently. ‘The timing is so perfect, and there's this incredible economy of just doing what is really to the point.’”
“There is a curious idea cherished by some people that no truly busy woman has time for fashion. Women like Gloria Vanderbilt are forever disconcerting them. Miss Vanderbilt, to put it conservatively, is a truly busy woman. She is, in private life, the wife of the stage, movie, and TV director Sidney Lumet and the mother of two lively young sons. In addition, she has been painting seriously for years, and has had two successful one-woman shows; she is an actress whose next role will be in her husband’s movie version of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, Rich Boy; a playwright, with a three-character play—Three by Two—scheduled for production, and another play—two characters this time—in the works. She is, what’s more, a spirited and decisive fashion personality, and bristles visibly at the suggestion that a touch of frumpishness is, somehow, one of the credentials of an active mind or a beautiful soul. She loves clothes, says ‘they’re one of the things about being a woman.’”
“Between Mrs. Wyatt Cooper and Mainbocher, rapport is perfect and admiration mutual—‘Nobody,’ he said recently, ‘is brighter about clothes; she comes in and picks things out right away...doesn’t even try them on before she decides what she wants.’ To Mrs. Cooper, it’s Main who ‘makes it all so easy.’ You put on a Mainbocher and forget about it; it’s right and that’s that.”
“Unruffled in ruffles, an enchanting bikini dress of red-and-white cotton-dotted Swiss, worn by Mrs. Cooper who, as Gloria Vanderbilt, will follow her successful exhibition of paintings at New York’s Hammer Galleries with another one-woman show this spring. The dress—with a huge ruffly circle of shawl covering the tiniest strip of bandeau, and a long, full skirt floating down to a deep double dust ruffle—by Anne Fogarty, of William Lind cotton. The coiffure by Miss Duval of the Kenneth Salon.”
“Gloria Copper in her dressing room: Seraglio 1968...papered in violets, paved with the same paper lacquered seven times....Wearing harem pants of the same violet print. Her companion: Bird the cockatiel. Just offstage is the lacquered Victorian dressing table where she does her marvelous all-evening, no-retouching makeup....Pants and the felt vest designed by Adolfo for Mrs. Cooper; she designed the lavender cotton shirt herself, and the chains and baubles are by Kenneth Lane.”
“Gloria Vanderbilt is, as we all know, a painter. And this season her works are all collages—romantic fantasies of long-gone queens and heroines muffled in snips of silver and gold foil. When Adolfo saw the collages he thought, Of course—and whipped up this extraordinary fantasy for Gloria to wear at the opening—the skirt and bodice of silver lace sprinkled with bits of shiny fuchsia and gold paillettes, mauve faux flowers nestled at the waist—the white organdie shirt with a ruff of silver lace, the white lace sleeves laced with peek-a-boo ribbons of red/green/blue grosgrain...Mrs. Cooper looking enchanting, was enchanted: ‘It’s like a child’s idea of what a dress would look like.’ ”
The artist photographed for a story titled, “Gloria the Great’s Patchwork Bedroom.”

Gloria Vanderbilt in Vogue

The artist photographed for a story titled, “Gloria the Great’s Patchwork Bedroom.”
Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, February 1, 1970
“On the street, in a room full of people, Gloria Cooper stands out. Pretty, yes—but other women are pretty. She has style. Beyond the way she ties a dime-store bandanna or arranges her necklaces—this color against that, that length against this, as though she were working out an assemblage—her presence has an intensity. Her hair is black as a paintbrush, her skin very white, and she is so slender that she seems, as was once said of Bernhardt, always to be in profile. She is opposites pulled together: casual, painstaking; reserved, open; a serious, adult painter—Gloria Vanderbilt—with a child’s gift for fantasy, which has given a new turn to her work….”
“At Geoffrey Beene’s grey-and-chrome showroom, Gloria Vanderbilt wears the two-piece dress with the tiny waist and bouffant skirt (‘My most prophetic silhouette’) in a delicious little print of pink flowers on cotton batiste—the summer party dress!”
Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, in her studio.

Gloria Vanderbilt in Vogue

Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, in her studio.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy, Vogue, March 2016

Like the true New Yorker she was, Gloria Vanderbilt, who died today at age 95, could say: “I did it my way.” This was a feat truly remarkable considering her heritage—Vanderbilt was born into one of America’s most-storied families—and the upheaval of her early life. After her father’s death in 1926, her custody and control of her trust fund were decided by the court in the “trial of the century.” But following convention was never of interest to Gloria.

At 17 she married the good-looking and mysterious actor’s agent Pat DiCicco. Three marriages would follow, and in time, Vanderbilt became a mother to four sons: Leopold and Christopher Stokowski, and Carter and Anderson Cooper. Vanderbilt was a familiar face in Vogue from the time of her birth, in 1924. Vanderbilt sat for photographers including Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Deborah Turbeville, and Richard Avedon. Avedon captured the heiress in her beloved, sensuous, micro-pleated silk Fortuny dresses and statement necklaces. Along the way she also penned a few articles for the magazine for which she so often posed. Her last sitting, with newscaster son Anderson, was in 2016.

Vanderbilt, who became an American designer herself when she entered the fashion arena with a popular line of denim at the beginning of the designer jean phenomenon, was often snapped in pieces by other homegrown talents like Mainbocher and Geoffrey Beene. She was “a spirited and decisive fashion personality,” and clotheshorse, wrote Vogue. “Miss Vanderbilt,” the magazine enthused, “wears clothes superbly, brings to fashion talent, enjoyment, a sense of drama, [and] a feeling for color—all endowments that also power her career as an actress, and her other enthusiasms, writing and painting.”

Though born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Vanderbilt chose to become a career woman. Perhaps her need to fill her life with activity and achievement was a response to her early abandonment. However that may be, when she filled her life with color and adventures, she filled that of the public as well, who followed the ups and downs of her journey for nine decades. Vanderbilt became an unusual embodiment of the American Dream, despite being born into great wealth, she was ultimately a self-made woman.

Originally Appeared on Vogue