The fashion figures we lost in 2022

Fashion can create community. These remembrances show the ripple effects that acts of kindness and opportunity had on the lives of the people we lost in 2022. Many of those waves were started by fashion’s greatest cheerleader, André Leon Talley, a trailblazer who apprenticed with Diana Vreeland at the Met before joining Vogue.

Hanae Mori paved the way for Issey Miyake, and other Japanese designers to show in Paris. Backstage photographer Roxanne Lowitt’s career was kickstarted by the gift of a camera from the artist Antonio Lopez, who also had a hand in helping Peter Hidalgo find his way in fashion. William Klein, who photographed model Dorothy McGowan in the latest looks, later cast her as the star of his satirical fashion film.... Fashion is a collective expression, and better for it. Here we take a moment to pay tribute to the stand-alone talents who contributed so much to the industry.

An angular beauty, Lucinda “Lucy” Hollingsworth was born on Long Island and signed with Ford Models after high school. She appeared on the cover of Vogue four times between 1956 and 1959, exuding the cool glamour of the era.

Long Nguyen “was a walking tome of fashion history,” wrote Christina Binkley in her remembrance of the stylist and editor. Born in Vietnam, and raised in Paris and the US, Long graduated from Princeton. His first job in the industry was with Dolce & Gabbana and his grunge-focused editorials for Detour garnered much attention. A co-founder of Flaunt Magazine (he left the title in 2019), Long was working on a book about ’90s fashion at the time of his death.

A raven-haired New Yorker, Roxanne Lowitt’s candid and backstage photographs of the beautiful people anticipated the celebrification of fashion. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Lowitt was working as a textile designer when she was gifted a camera by the artist Antonio Lopez. She brought it backstage and soon landed an assignment to cover the shows in Paris for SoHo News in the 1970s. With the front-of-house at runway shows being male-dominated, Lowitt found her niche behind-the-scenes and at the after-parties, where the action was.

Photographer and filmmaker William Klein died just before the closing of a retrospective of his work in his hometown of New York. He titled the exhibition “Yes,” he told curator David Campany, because “I said ‘yes’ to everything. If an opportunity came along and I could do it, even if it was a little outside of my comfort zone, I said ‘yes,’ because you never know what it will lead to.” Klein’s penchant for being what Company calls an “outsider/insider” translated to a provocative, sometimes satirical, disequilibrium in his work, be it street or fashion photography. Klein settled in Paris after a stint in the army and studied painting with Fernand Léger, progressing rapidly from realism to abstraction. He became interested in camera work while working on an interior design project. His trajectory in that medium went from abstraction to realism. The photographs Klein made while working at Vogue in 1965 and 1966 offered commentary on the artifice of the industry, as did his iconic film Qui Êtes-Vous Polly Maggoo?

Hanae Mori paved the way for many of her countrymen and women to follow. The first Japanese member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisiennes in 1977, her designs brought together elements of Japanese and Western dress to create, as she once said, “the atmosphere of the kimono.” Born in 1926 in Mukaichi, Shimane Prefecture, Mori studied Japanese literature before her marriage to Kenzo Mori, scion of a textile manufacturing business. Not content to be a housewife, she studied design in Tokyo before setting up shop in 1951. She first brought her work to New York in 1965. Mori was as committed to fostering East-West relations, inviting European and American designers to show in Tokyo, as she was to her own work. The designer presented her final collection in Paris in 2004.

Born in Sweden and educated at the Royal College of Art in London, Eric Boman was a multifaceted artist with a sharp wit and golden glow. He was working as an illustrator when in 1972, he borrowed his partner Peter Schlesinger’s camera for a story assigned to him by Anna Wintour, then at Harpers & Queen. Over the years Boman became known as the man who photographed “all things bright and beautiful for Vogue.” That his interests were catholic is shown in the various subjects of the books he published, ranging from a Victorian dollhouse to Manolo Blahnik shoes. “He understood and appreciated fashion,” Wintour has said of Boman. “He had an insider-outsider eye for it, but he loved environments and still-lifes and he was ahead of the game in that he could do so many different things.”

Lost too soon to cancer, LaTisha Chong was a hair stylist who worked with stars like Serena Williams and Jeremy O. Harris, and as hair director for Telfar Clemens. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Chong immigrated to the US as a young girl and served in the Air Force before following her creative passion. “She was a breath of fresh air of artistry in the way she did hair, bringing in the historical Black hair knowledge, which is so lacking, but also the artfulness and the level of critique,” said Paloma Elsesser. “She showed me what a commitment to craft was.”

Having lived through the bombing of Hiroshima, which destroyed the world as he knew it, Issey Miyake could have been bitter. Instead, he took an expansive view of the world—and fashion—that later became literally manifest through his flexible and stretchy pleats. The designer founded his own line in 1970 and was invited to show in Paris. His focus was always on fabrics, which he used in new ways and further developed using new technologies. His textile breakthrough was enabled by an approach to creativity that brought the learning and techniques of the past forward, forming a continuum with history. “All design intersects, there are no boundaries between art, design, and other creative activities,” Miyake once said. Proving his point, the surprising starting point for Miyake’s ever popular Pleats Please line was a collaboration with William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet company in 1991. Miyake ceded creative direction of his menswear line in 1994, and that of womenswear five years later, while retaining oversight of the business. An industry giant, Miyake literally reshaped how we see fashion through material innovation and the interaction between the natural body and garments.

Katie Gallagher, a black-clad blonde from Pennsylvania with a talent for pattern-making, was being buzzed about even before she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and moved to New York. The central dichotomy in her work was the balance between what she called the “cute with the hard.” Gallagher was early to bring activewear into fashion and was known for adding a sexy spin to performance-type designs, and had a penchant for bows. “Katie,” said fellow designer and friend Maayan Zilberman, “was not concerned with trends, commerce, or seemingly, critique. It was most important to her for her fantasy to live in a reality of her making.”

“I’m really the super fan, but with me it’s a business.” That was Ron Galella whose paparazzi shots of the rich and famous helped define celebrity culture as we know it today. Born in New York, the son of Italian immigrants, Galella trained as a photographer while serving with the US Air Force during the Korean War, and later got a degree in photojournalism in California. Back home in New York, Galella took his camera out on the town, where he captured the beautiful people – including his obsession, Jaqueline Kennedy – in their unguarded moments by any means necessary.

A character of her own creation, the self-named Jordan was born in Sussex and kicked out of school for her adventurous sense of style. London was her mecca, and a after a brief stint at Harrod’s she joined Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren’s extended family, working in and becoming the face of their shop Sex. Jordan was drawn into the orbit of McClaren’s bands, the Sex Pistols and Adam and the Ants as well, and along the way became a star in her own right, with appearances in two of Derek Jarman’s films. “She also made an appearance in the highly controversial first airing of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ on British national television,” wrote Liam Hess, “standing at the front of the crowd in a T-shirt that read ‘only anarchists are pretty.’”

A self-taught photographer born in Le Havre, France, Patrick Demarchelier, balanced elegance and natural ease in his work. He worked closely with Grace Coddington at British and American Vogue, and in 1989 he became the personal portraitist of Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the recipient of many awards, including those from the French Ministry of Culture and the CFDA. Despite a rich and deep legacy, in 2018 amidst the #MeToo reckoning, Demarchelier was among a number of photographers accused of sexual harassment. Demarchelier denied the allegations. “Photographers have to make the clothes look fantastic, that’s why we get paid,” he said in a 2012 interview, “and I have positive eyes.”

An eight-time Vogue cover model and one of the Charlie fragrance faces, the smiling, crop-haired Susanne Schöneborn was the embodiment of the liberated woman of the 1970s. “Anyone who even had just a passing interaction with her was impacted by her kind and youthful spirit,” said her daughter Alexandra Menna. Schöneborn was born in West Berlin and moved to Paris to model before landing in New York.

“The great Pablo is now here,” announced Vogue in the May 1964 issue, featuring the makeup artist’s handiwork on the cover. Born into an aristocratic Italian family, through contacts the inexperienced Manzoni got a job at Elizabeth Arden in Rome, where he soon made a name for himself, bleaching Sophia Loren’s eyebrows and working with other notables. He also collaborated with designers, creating fantastical maquillage to enhance their work and play-up the fantasy element. In 1965, a year after joining Elizabeth Arden in New York, he received a Coty Award, the first in the field. “Elizabeth Arden’s Pablo has done for makeup and the makeup man what Kenneth did for hair and the hairdresser, he has lifted cosmetics from an accessory executed by who knows to an important component of fashion executed by a star,” wrote Priscilla Tucker, a Herald Tribune News Service writer in 1965.

“A fashion oracle and an entirely original man,” is Hamish Bowles’s apt description of André Leon Talley, Vogue editor extraordinaire. Born in Washington, D.C. and raised by his grandmother in Durham, North Carolina, Talley studied French literature at Brown University after which he came to New York and apprenticed with Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. This was followed by stints at Andy Warhol’s Interview, Women’s Wear Daily, and the New York Times. He started as the fashion news director at Vogue in 1983; five years later he was named creative director, the first Black man to hold the position. “He was like the Black Rockette… he was the one,” said Whoopi Goldberg, in the 2018 biopic The Gospel According to André. In fact, Talley had the energy and enthusiasm of the whole chorus line. “Time with André was gala time; he didn’t do banal,” wrote Bowles. “And he pushed and fought for diversity at every turn.”

One of fashion’s great showmen, Manfred Thierry Mugler’s work projected strength and fantasy. His “type” was a cross-species femme fatale; he presented women as robots, motorcycles, and even clams, but he could also see them as goddesses and angels. Beyonce, Cardi B, and Kim Kardashian are recent fans of Mugler’s archival work. Born in Strasbourg, Mugler was trained as a dancer for the opera. He moved to Paris in 1966 and seven years later established his own maison. Success built upon success. Angel, the house’s best-selling fragrance, was launched in 1992, the same year Mugler directed George Michael’s “Too Funky” video. Ten years later he left fashion and soon was working with the Cirque du Soleil, bringing his magic into another realm.

World News Today once dubbed Gaspard Ulliel “a child of fashion,” which he was literally and figuratively. Born just outside of Paris, the actor was the son of a fashion designer father and a stylist mother. Long before Ulliel played Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 film, or became the face of a Chanel fragrance, he walked in Hedi Slimane’s fall 2003 show, but of course, his heart belonged to the screen. Ulliel who segued from television to film, was the recipient of two César Awards.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Peter Hidalgo first came into contact with New York City’s downtown club and fashion scenes through Antonio Lopez. The illustrator selected Hidalgo for a special course in an arts school. Gifted with a paintbrush himself, Hidalgo often made himself up for his late night vogueing performances. Hidalgo worked side-by-side with the renegade designer Miguel Adrover for many years. He later struck out on his own, creating structured and ladylike looks, and was a co-winner of the Fashion Group International’s Rising Star Award in 2010. More recently he worked, as he had at the start of his career, with private clients.

“Style is balance, but with a dramatic twist,” said Nino Cerrutti in an interview with Vogue Italia published in 2021, some 71 years after the Italian dynamo inherited the textile business founded by his grandfather in 1881. His debut line, Hitman, presented in 1957, was recognized as groundbreaking. “He was the first to deconstruct the formal suit and bring genderless garments to the masses,” wrote Fabiana Giacomotti. “He detests everything that clings to the body, that constrains it, that fails to indulge its capacity for movement and expression of thoughts.” (Giorgio Armani, who spent six years at Cerruti’s side, would take these innovations as his starting point.) Indeed, Cerruti’s focus was always on physicality as an extension of fabric, his obsession, and he brought the expressiveness of his materials and silhouettes to everyday wardrobes of men and women, as well as to the silver screen, making costumes for The Jewel of the Nile (1985) and The Proprietor (1996)—as well as a few cameos.

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Dorothy McGowan graced the cover of Vogue 13 times between 1960 and 1962. Dark-haired with a fair complexion and a bit of wide-eyed gaze à la Clara Bow or Betty Boop, she said of herself, “I was a simple kid from Brooklyn, not a great beauty. I had a certain grace, because I was trained to be a dancer, but I was too tall. So I answered an ad in The New York Times that said, ‘Trainee in fashion wanted.’ A photographer said, ‘I don’t know, but this girl has something. There’s something about this girl.’ Within six months I was working with Irving Penn.” So iconic was she, William Klein cast her in the role of charming American in Paris in Qui Êtes-Vous Polly Maggoo?