Vogue fashion editor was once stranded overnight in the Andes, wrapped in furs
Babs Simpson, who has died aged 105, was fashion editor of Vogue from 1947 to 1972, working with the editors Edna Woolman Chase, Carmel Snow, Jessica Daves, and then Diana Vreeland; known for her understated yet authoritative taste, she was equally understated about her private life.
In many ways she might have been from central casting. Small, fierce, and pithily opinionated, her 5ft 3in physique topped with a no-fuss hairstyle, Simpson maintained her ramrod straight posture and elegance into old age by a rigorous regime of Pilates and training sessions with a triathlete.
At Vogue she championed the minimal look long before it became fashionable, one of her assistants in the 1950s recalling her as wearing ‘‘nothing but black dresses and huge jewels’’.
The writer Patricia Highsmith was said to have been in love with her. And Wendy Goodman, who worked with her at House & Garden in the 1970s, recalled her as always having ‘‘a highly edited sense of elegance’’.
But during a life of travelling to fashion shows and assignments, she never took herself – or the fashion world – too seriously, recalling that during shoots she would often sit in a corner and do needlework, ‘‘otherwise you’d go crazy with boredom. Some photographers took forever’’.
‘‘I never wanted to be Queen of the May,’’ she told an interviewer, ‘‘I never let the fashion world affect me.’’ Instead she generally preferred the world of books, theatre and ballet. Asked in 2011 whether she had any regrets, she replied: ‘‘Not really. I just wish I’d been a nicer person.’’
She was born Beatrice de Menocal in what was then called Peking, into American aristocracy. Her father was a banker and, according to Oscar de la Renta, a scion of one of the grandest families in Cuba. Her mother Beatrice was from Washington Square.
The family moved about South America before settling in Boston, where in her teens Babs was a regular on the nightclub circuit: ‘‘The rule at nightclubs was that no group of boys bigger than five could come in without a girl, so you would start getting calls in the afternoon about going out. Quite naturally, one felt the belle of the ball.’’
In 1935, in what The Boston Globe called ‘‘one of the most important weddings of the June season’’, she married William Simpson, a Harvard graduate from Chicago. The marriage lasted only seven years, though after their divorce Simpson reportedly continued to send her extravagant gifts.
In 1942 she arrived in Manhattan where, in 1944, Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief, recruited her from the Lord & Taylor department store to a lowly position at Harper’s Bazaar on US$35 a week.
She fell in with a glamorous bohemian crowd including the jeweller Fulco di Verdura, Johnny Nicholson, owner of the Cafe Nicholson (where Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal and Jean Renoir held court in the postwar years), and Syrie Maugham, the decorator and wife of Somerset Maugham.
In 1949 Simpson’s friend Barbara ‘‘Babe’’ Cushing, then fashion editor at Vogue, called to say she was leaving the magazine to marry, and to ask if Simpson might be interested in taking her place. She joined the magazine just at the time when Dior’s ‘‘New Look’’ was taking the fashion world by storm.
Vreeland, editor-in-chief from 1963-71, said: ‘‘Babs was the most marvellous editor in the way of knowing how to turn the girls out correctly – by ‘correctly’ I mean in the mood in which they were sent – but she’s rather a sombre girl.’’
Among other assignments, she set up the portraits of a gossamer-veiled naked Marilyn Monroe, taken by the photographer Bert Stern six weeks before the star’s death. ‘‘I remember saying to Bert on the plane back that that girl is in dire straits,’’ she recalled.
Eventually, Simpson concluded that Vreeland had begun brilliantly but had become drunk on self-importance, to the detriment of Vogue and the fashion industry.
One particularly bizarre incident involved Vreeland’s decision to have models in evening dresses photographed on top of a mountain in the Andes. It got late but the photographer insisted on continuing. Simpson was in the party stranded there overnight, huddled under Maximilian furs. When they were rescued the next day by the Peruvian army, the ground was covered with mountain lion tracks.
During all these years Simpson’s salary was, as she put it, ‘‘despicable’’.
In 1972 she joined House & Garden, styling interiors shoots through the 1970s and 1980s until the magazine closed in 1993.
She never remarried and remained discreet about her love life, though a friend recalled her revealing that her pet troupial, a bird which would often perch on top of her head, ‘‘just hated’’ all her lovers and would sometimes attack them. The best cure for a broken heart, she would say, was ‘‘the next man’’.
Eventually she found bohemian companionship with Paul Magriel, an art collector and writer. They lived in the same building in Manhattan, while maintaining their own apartments on different floors. He died in 1990.
She also owned a Paul Lester Wiener modernist home in Amagansett, on the East End of Long Island, later downsizing to a small apartment in a retirement community in Rye, New York.
When asked how she could bear to part with a lifetime’s belongings, she replied: ‘‘I don’t think it’s strength of character. I think it’s clarity of mind about one’s own identity.’’
In 2006, aged 93, she became the oldest person to be given a feature in Vogue, looking cool and relaxed in cashmere, chinos and a string of pearls. In 2012, aged 99, she was included in a documentary and book about Vogue fashion editors, posing for a group portrait in pink jeans amid a sea of black. ‘‘I think it’s very depressing if one wore the same skirt and shirt forever,’’ she explained. –
The best cure for a broken heart, she would say, was ‘‘the next man’’.