Source: Dennis Van Tine/Future Image/WENN.com / WENN
There has always been a connection between art, fashion and iconic representation in the world in which we live.
So I want to take a moment of retrospection and share some memories of the late great Gloria Vanderbilt.
Gloria Vanderbilt was born a wealthy heiress but was determined to forge her own way through life.
Fashion designer, artist, socialite, and author, peacefully passed away with family and friends at her side after battling advanced stomach cancer.
She was the mother of newscaster Anderson Cooper and was 95 years of age upon her passing. I think Gloria Vanderbilt was like a celebrity’s celebrity. She had a reputation of being a fashion mogul and a no nonsense soul.
The famed jeans designer. Here are 4 things to know about Gloria.
- She was the center of a famed custody dispute at 10 years old.
- She was a successful jeans designer in the 1970s
- She was married four times.
- she had four sons including the aforementioned Anderson Cooper
“Gloria Vanderbilt jeans soon became a $100 million-a-year business, with skirts, sweaters, jackets, linens, and fragrances joining her growing product lines. After years of living on inherited money, Ms. Vanderbilt had a share of the profits and a burgeoning income of her own — $10 million in 1980 alone — and it felt good.
“I’m not knocking inherited money,” she told The New York Times in 1985, “but the money I’ve made has a reality to me that inherited money doesn’t have. As the Billie Holiday song goes, ‘Mama may have and Papa may have, but God bless the child that’s got his own.’ ”
Ms. Vanderbilt’s 2004 memoir, “It Seemed Important at the Time,” reminisced at length on her affairs with Brando, Sinatra, Kelly, Hughes and other Hollywood legends. “Shall I start with scandal or broken dreams? With great love or shattering loss?” she wrote, inviting readers into her guiltless ruminations.
But she also offered an explanation for her lifelong fascination with sex and romance.
“I would have to say that the love of my life was my mother,” she wrote. “The men are substitutes, let’s say, substitutes for my old sweetheart.”
An American Icon has moved through our lives as an example of courage, strength, and destiny.
May her example be long remembered.
Til next time…be blessed!
