The first time I met Eleanor Lambert was in the 1990s, when she needed a new assistant and interviewed me for the role. I distinctly remember my first impressions of Miss Lambert. I arrived early to the interview and she was just coming back from an event, so we actually met on the elevator. She was wearing a tunic pantsuit, turban and Geoffrey Beene magenta ostrich feather chubby, carrying a huge Hermès crocodile Kelly bag with a fast-paced determined walk. She was very polite, very direct, very intimidating, and very decisive. She told me I needed to wear a suit every day as well as read the New York Times, WWD, New York Post, and Daily News before I got to the office. She asked if I could start immediately.
These qualities led her to become the most influential, game-changing, prolific, and inspiring leader of American fashion. Miss Lambert was the first-ever fashion publicist, who transformed a local industry into a global powerhouse. She advanced the careers of Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Calvin Klein, and Halston; she was the force behind the International Best-Dressed List, the Battle of Versailles, the Costume Institute and the Met Gala, the Coty Awards, the CFDA Awards, and, of course, the Council of Fashion Designers of America itself, which she founded in 1962.
She put American fashion on the global stage. I don’t think people realize what a total revolutionary she was. She was always for the artist and the creator. She was their champion. She realized early on that if she dressed (and acted) like the empress, she could make things happen faster.
When people say, “Make lemonade out of lemons,” she did…but what she also did is to squeeze every drop out of her successes.
Her story is intertwined with the history of fashion in the 20th century. You can’t really talk about one without the other.
At first a very successful publicist for the arts (she was the first Press Director of the Whitney and MoMA was her idea; fashion came to her in the early 1930s when designer Adele Simpson hired her to generate the kind of visibility usually reserved for European designers. The American fashion industry then was a rag trade: manufacturers took French and Italian designs and knocked them off. Miss Lambert took on Adele Simpson and milliner Lilly Daché and that’s how the work began.
There were two American fashion magazines at the time: Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. The editors would see the new collections in Europe and report on those; they rarely covered American fashion. But the World War II changed this. The need to keep the domestic economy strong led to the formation of the New York Dress Institute whose mission was to promote women to buy American-made dresses. Miss Lambert became its driving force.
She had a lot of ideas. Fashion Week was one of them. She believed it’s not enough to see just coats or dresses, you needed to see full collections.
She started the Coty awards modeled after the Academy awards, and then, when Calvin Klein and then Halston said they would reject a Coty nomination because the tie to the beauty giant was too commercial, she started the CFDA Awards.
She came up with the Met Ball to support the Costume Institute, and to also give women a reason to buy and wear American designers.
To promote what women wore, she created the International Best-Dressed List and put women who wore clothes from New York Dress Institute designers – Bill Blass, Mainbocher, Lilly Daché among them – on the list.
Believing that American fashion deserved a rightful place at the table, she called regional publishers and urged them to send editors to New York and review our talent.
Miss Lambert liked to recall how she once told her friend Diana Vreeland, then a young editor at Harper’s Bazaar, that American fashion was just as good as in Europe. Mrs. Vreeland tapped her on the hand and said, “Oh dear, you are such an amateur.” Miss Lambert would of course prove her dear friend wrong.
She was very aggressive about snatching the thunder of the Europeans. She did everything to promote American fashion.
Nothing was ever a problem to her. She just always knew what she wanted and made it happen. For Versailles, she waited 40 years to showcase American design in France. She had done thousands of shows all over the world for the State Department and the Department of Commerce, and when the cultural moment was ready, she was too. She focused on what she wanted, nothing else.
When Jacqueline Kennedy reached out to Miss Lambert after being called out by Women’s Wear Daily for wearing Givenchy, she urged the First Lady to wear American and introduced her to Halston, whose pill box became a signature. When the First Lady wanted to create a Council for the Arts, Miss Lambert suggested including fashion as an art.
Mrs. Kennedy didn’t continue working on the bill for the national endowment after the President was assassinated. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law, he gave the pen -he only used one – at the signing ceremony to Miss Lambert. She was the only person ever to be on the National Council of the Arts (which oversees the National Endowment of the Arts) and the National Endowment of the Arts.
There were really two Eleanor Lamberts. She was a fashion publicist, but she wasn’t really in it for the clients; she was in it for the industry. That’s why she represented both American and European designers, like Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. She thought, “if you could raise the global industry, everyone would benefit.”
She hated corporations. She loved talent. They were difficult, but she didn’t care. She went around to them, she’d yell at them, and they were afraid of her. She played the part to the fullest. She dressed like a grand dame, and she was a terror.
She didn’t want the garment manufacturers to control Fashion Week, she wanted the designers to control it.
Miss Lambert decided to start an organization run by fashion designers for fashion designers – the CFDA – so they can control their own destiny.
I think more than Versailles, this is the legacy. She wanted the power of the CFDA to be for the designers. She understood it was a trade group but wanted to make it glamourous. She understood that fashion was just cloth, but she knew how an amazing garment could make her feel, and therefore had to be talked about in the most glamorous way.
John Tiffany is the author of Eleanor Lambert: Still Here. Click here to purchase the book.
