Polly Mellen, the irrepressible and indomitable fashion editor who was the last link to the profession’s long golden age, when fashion editors were fearsome creatures who ruled by fiat, and a photograph in Vogue magazine, where Ms. Mellen worked for more than a quarter century, moved not just markets but the culture, died on Wednesday in Salisbury, Conn. She was 100 — an attractive round number, which Ms. Mellen, ever the perfectionist, surely appreciated.
Her daughter, Leslie Bell, confirmed the death.
With the photographer Richard Avedon, her longtime collaborator, Ms. Mellen created some of the most arresting images in contemporary fashion.
There was Twiggy, the waifish 1960s avatar, one eye painted with a psychedelic flower, twinkling on the cover of Vogue in 1967. The actress Nastassja Kinski stretched out in the magazine’s pages in 1981, naked except for the boa constrictor coiled around her and an ivory cuff on one wrist. (Ms. Mellen later regretted that cuff. It was too distracting, she said.) Rudolf Nureyev was unaccessorized and completely naked in a spread that appeared in Vogue in 1967.
With Helmut Newton, in 1975, Ms. Mellen produced “The Story of Ohh,” which included a photo of the model Lisa Taylor, legs akimbo, with one hand tucked suggestively in the pocket of her dress, gazing coolly at a male model’s backside — a potent expression of female agency and sexuality. (In those days, fashion features were considered narratives, even if the plot seemed nonsensical to civilians. This one was in homage to the popular French erotic novel “The Story of O.”)
Ms. Mellen had been a protégée of Diana Vreeland, the famously hortatory fashion director of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s who memorably declared the bikini to be the most important thing since the atomic bomb (and pink to be the navy blue of India), and who brought Ms. Mellen to Vogue soon after she became its editor in 1962. She also brought Mr. Avedon, with whom Ms. Mellen formed perhaps the most significant relationship of her career — she likened it to a love affair.
“From Vreeland’s rib came Polly Mellen,” Mr. Avedon told The New York Times in 1994. “From that day on, Eden never looked better.”
Ms. Mellen was a personality and a presence, with a breathy mid-Atlantic accent, a short white bob and eyebrows as sharp as circumflexes. At fashion shows, unlike her stony-faced peers, she was often moved to vocalize, and it was her habit, when especially moved, to stand up and applaud, elbows flapping, tears streaming down her face. She might even grab a handful of fabric as a model swished past her on a runway.
Like her mentor, she was prone to evocative, if at times inscrutable, aphorisms, which generations of her fans memorized like a catechism. Guy Trebay, writing in The New York Times, once described her idiosyncratic vernacular as “a form of unapologetically gaga fashion speak that, alas, may soon become extinct.”
“Hello, this says hello to me very distinctly,” Ms Mellen enthused as she marched up to a clothing rack hung with candy-colored faux fur chubbies, otherwise known as short jackets, in the showroom of the designer Isaac Mizrahi — one of her enticing cameos in “Unzipped,” Douglas Keeve’s engaging 1995 documentary about the making of one of Mr. Mizrahi’s shows. Later in the movie she cautioned the designer: “Fussy, finished. Too much jewelry. No!” And, finally: “Be careful of makeup. Be careful!”
As Janet Maslin wrote in her Times review of “Unzipped,” Ms. Mellen sounded “solemn enough to be warning Caesar about the Ides of March.”
It would be a mistake to dismiss Ms. Mellen’s utterances as mere performance art, though there was a bit of that. She was deadly serious about her craft, and her eye was infallible.
“She couldn’t put an apple down without it falling in the right place,” said the veteran editor and magazine writer Stephen Drucker, who in 1988 spent three weeks in Africa with Ms. Mellen and the photographer Sheila Metzner shooting a feature for Vogue that involved the actress Kim Basinger and 23 trunks of clothing and props. “Like Diana Vreeland, she had a supernatural talent. It was a form of fashion perfect pitch. I would have given anything to have seen the world through Polly’s eyes for five minutes.”
Mr. Drucker was so taken with Ms. Mellen’s aperçus that he kept a notebook. On seeing a bird: “That little bird is chartreuse. Such a modern bird.” On seeing a zebra: “Now, that’s makeup.”
“She spoke in a kind of fashion iambic pentameter,” he said, “like a Vogue caption, often in triplets. Say anything three times and it sounds important. Somehow she sounded like she was addressing the human condition.”
Wendy Goodman, design director of New York magazine, said: “Nobody felt things the way Polly felt things. Fashion for her was highly personal, highly emotional and all about celebrating the possibilities of reinvention. In the end it was about beauty, a point which I think people miss.”
She was hard on assistants, who decades later spoke of their time with her as a kind of Parris Island of fashion and of their pride in having survived it.
Vera Wang, the Vogue editor turned bridal designer, remembered her first day with Ms. Mellen, in the early 1970s, when she fixed her new assistant with a gimlet eye and asked coldly, “Are you a genius?’” Ms. Wang said quietly that she didn’t think she was. “Well,” Ms. Mellen said, “you better get a pad and a pen; you’re going to have to remember a lot.”
“Perfectionism was not enough,” Ms. Wang said. “At one point I begged to go work in the accounting department.”
She was highly disciplined, on set and off. Georgia Dullea, writing in The Times in 1994 when Ms. Mellen won a lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, noted: “She gave up lunch years ago, but will have an occasional apple, a Granny Smith. She abuses Evian water.”
Linda Wells, the founding editor of Allure magazine, where Ms. Mellen was creative director from 1991 until her retirement in 1999, said: “You could see her precision in the way she dressed” — often in a sweater and a pencil skirt — “and held herself, ramrod straight. She’d pop an Altoid and say, ‘Delicious! I’m full!’”
Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York, captured her in his 2013 memoir, “The Asylum: True Tales of Madness From a Life in Fashion.” “Fashion, for Polly, is, and always has been, a majestic, magical, mysterious galleon in full sail,” he wrote, “and you would be insane not to hurl convention to the wind and jump on board.”
Harriette Allen, who was always known as Polly, was born on June 18, 1924, in West Hartford, Conn. Her family was well-to-do: Her father, Walter Allen, was the head of an insurance company and a bit of a dandy; her mother, Leslie (Smith) Allen, was his stylish second wife.
Polly and her four siblings spent summers in Paris and Cap d’Antibes, accompanied by a tutor and a governess. Polly attended boarding schools in Connecticut, first the Ethel Walker School and then Miss Porter’s, Jacqueline Bouvier’s alma mater. She graduated at the height of World War II, which meant no coming-out parties for would-be debutantes like herself.
“I just drifted out,” she told The Times, and went to work as a nurse’s aide at an army hospital in Virginia.
By 1949 Polly was in New York City, living in a boardinghouse for young women on East 61st Street and working as a saleswoman at Lord & Taylor. Her college experience, she often joked, was running the College Shop there. There were brief stops at Saks Fifth Avenue, and then Mademoiselle magazine, before she was hired at Harper’s Bazaar by Mrs. Vreeland (editors in days of yore were always addressed in the honorific of the times).
Mrs. Vreeland paired her with her star photographer, Mr. Avedon. Polly was 27 and he was 26, and he was not exactly keen to work with her at first. As Ms. Mellen recalled, he told Mrs. Vreeland: “Diana, I can’t work with her, she is too noisy. ’”
Polly kept her mouth shut through their first shoot together — of an up-and-coming young actress named Audrey Hepburn — after which Mr. Avedon complained that she was too quiet and he liked a bit of noise on the set. “And from that moment on,” Ms. Mellen said, “I was never quiet.”
It was Mr. Avedon who formed her, she often said, but so did working with Bert Stern, who she described as more theatrical than Mr. Avedon, the minimalist, and Irving Penn, whose studio, she told System Magazine, “was all about calm and silence.”
Polly left Harper’s Bazaar in 1952 to marry Louis Baker Bell, an executive at the Philadelphia department store Wanamaker’s; they divorced eight years later, and she returned to New York. She married Henry Mellen, a publishing executive, in 1965.
Ms. Mellen was the rare editor who throughout her decades-long career continued to champion young designers and photographers, and always made the effort to see their work; her contemporaries, in contrast, might not be so eager to give up their Friday evenings at their country houses if a new talent was showing somewhere inconvenient or at an inconveniently late hour.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Mellen is survived by her son, Louis Baker Bell Jr.; her stepchildren, Lucinda Mellen and Henry Mellen; and four grandchildren. Mr. Mellen died in 2014.
“I’m a realist, but I’m considered in a fantasy world because I’m enthusiastic,” Ms. Mellen told Michael Musto in 1999 when they toured the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for The Times. They drew a rapt crowd as Ms. Mellen threw out tasty morsels like “I’ve always been enamored of Cinderella and rags and shredding.”
Shortly after her centennial birthday in June, Ms. Mellen was diagnosed with cancer. When her daughter picked her up after her first radiation treatment, Ms. Mellen exclaimed, with her usual enthusiasm: “Leslie! You don’t know what you’ve missed. It was like ‘Star Wars’!”
The post Polly Mellen, Fashion’s Storied Cheerleader, Dies at 100 appeared first on New York Times.
