Miss Fleur Cowles - a true classic.

There's nothing more chic than having Cary Grant as best man at you wedding - and that's exactly what Fleur Cowles did. She was style personified, in a way we just don't see anymore.

She always wore well-tailored suits, loved large dark-rimmed glasses and an air of mystique. Her signature were large cocktail rings and fresh roses.

In the great traditions of reinvention Ms Cowles was an absolute artiste. She was named Florence Freidman when she was born. Her birth records said 1908, Ms Cowles (or should we call her Flo?) said 1917.

She started as a copywriter in a department store then in advertising in Boston. By 1931 she was writing a daily fashion column in New York which was considered witty, amusing and irreverent.

She launched the fashion magazine Flair in 1950. It was the first of the new wave of magazines for women - featuring art, travel, ideas, fiction, discussion. It failed after a year - losing millions.

By 1953 she was back at the top again - attending the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth as an official US ambassador and doing good works for famine relief - traveling the world meeting the leaders of the times.

In 1996 Cowles wrote her memoirs - She Made Friends And Kept Them. The English Daily Telegraph said of the book, "names were not so much dropped as hurled in a barrage."

Ms Cowles was a new age woman before we could come to terms with what that meant. A gifted art historian, tireless charity worker, stylish woman and terrible gossip - what more could you want? Rest in peace Fleur.

An It Girl to the last!

Ah, how often we forget that we didn’t invent the ‘it’ girl. Maxime de La Falaise who has died at age 87 was an “it” girl 1950s. Even the name oozes cool (actually she was born plain old Maxine Birley – give this girl credit for reinvention).

She was Cecil Beaton's muse – the star photographer of his day. He called her the “only truly chic Englishwoman” of her generation.

She was a model, a food writer and stared in an Andy Warhol film. She was born in London but lived in Paris and New York. She designed exquisite clothes, furniture, rugs and bags.

She had wonderful affairs, often with ‘playboys’ as they called the idle rich in the 1940s and 1950s. She also had serious romances -with Louis Malle and the surrealist painter Max Ernst and later, John Paul Getty III. She was married to John McKendry, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And of course she was the mother of the exquisite model Loulou de la Falaise who was an “it” girl of the 1980’s.

Vale Maxime! What a wonderful life!
Maxime De La Falaise, 1922-2009

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