GLORIA VANDERBILT HAS DIED AT THE AGE OF 95. THE HEIRESS, SOCIALITE, AND DESIGNER CAPTIVATED ONLOOKERS AND CHANGED AMERICAN FASHION WITH HER LINE OF DENIM.

by ERIN VANDERHOOF

After a life spent in the spotlight, American heiress, socialite, and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt has died at the age of 95, her son Anderson Cooper announced on CNN this morning. The cause was stomach cancer, Cooper said.

Though at different times in her life she worked as a stage and TV actress, model, textile designer, and artist, Vanderbilt was best known for her extravagant social life and her close friendships with the likes of Truman Capote and Diane von Furstenberg and romances with Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, and Sidney Lumet. With an old-world patrician’s accent and an instinctive sense of style, she and the images of her impeccably decorated apartments captivated onlookers for decades.

Born on February 20, 1924, to railroad heir Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and his wife, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt was famous from her birth, which was greeted with the headline “R.C. VANDERBILTS HAVE A DAUGHTER” in the next day’s New York Times. After her father’s death 18 months later, Vanderbilt inherited a $4.7 million trust fund.

 In 1934 a custody battle broke out between Vanderbilt’s mother and her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum. Her mother lost and from then on Vanderbilt lived in her aunt’s home, though she later recalled to Vanity Fair that the two had little contact. The episode led the era’s press to call her the “poor little rich girl.”

In the late 1960s, she began to receive recognition for the paintings and collages she had already been making for most of her adult life, most notably when Johnny Carson used them to decorate his Tonight Show set. It led to her forays into textile design and later to putting her name of a branded line of denim that defined the fusion of mass market and luxury in the 1980s. She ultimately made more money than she inherited through her fashion venture, earning $10 million in 1980 alone. “The money you make yourself is the only kind of money that has any reality,” she said to the Financial Times in 2014.

Her private life was marked by more tragedy. She married four times and had four children, two with conductor Leopold Stokowski and two with her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper, who died after surgery at the age of 50 in 1978. Her son Carter Vanderbilt Cooper died after jumping from his mother’s balcony in 1988 at the age of 23. She later revisited the pain of the experience in a documentary and book she worked on with Anderson Cooper in 2016.

Her fashion career largely ended in the 1990s, and afterward she focused primarily on making art and writing, ultimately publishing several books of poetry and memoirs. In April 2017, she started an Instagram account, which she used to share old photos, press clippings, and new paintings. She last posted to the account—an image of the framed photos and artwork hanging on the tiles in her bathroom—on June 10.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/06/gloria-vanderbilt-obituary