Patricia Peterson, the fashion editor of The New York Times during a distant era when hemlines made headlines and women in pantsuits were considered controversial — trends she tracked with enthusiasm and humor — died on June 9 at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was 99.
Her daughter, Annika Peterson, confirmed the death.
Ms. Peterson joined The Times in 1956, when so-called women’s news appeared under the heading “Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings,” and the all-female department covering it was tucked away on the ninth floor of the paper’s headquarters on West 43rd Street, far from the main newsroom, on the third floor.
But she was in distinguished company. Her colleagues included Gloria Emerson, who would go on to cover the Vietnam War; Phyllis Lee Levin, who wrote biographies of the first ladies Abigail Adams and Edith Wilson; and Nan Robertson, who became a Washington correspondent and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Male reporters and editors rarely ventured upstairs. “It was as if we kept the measles up on the ninth floor,” Ms. Levin was quoted as saying in a Times article in 2018.
But the women knew they were documenting a changing culture and that those changes were often expressed in fashion.
“That was what was so exciting about fashion,” Ms. Peterson said in 1989 for an oral history of the paper. “It wasn’t just Seventh Avenue or Paris, it was life around us.”
In 1957, when Ms. Peterson was named fashion editor, she reported on gold lamé “hostess pajamas,” fancy PJs to host a party in, and on hemlines rising to as high as 16½ inches from the floor. (That’s still below the knee for most women.) In 1970, she saw them plummeting again: “Timid women may still show their legs for summer,” she wrote, “but by fall the minis are sure to look like the warmed-over sixties.”
In 1965, she featured breeches, along with braided hair and ribbons — a sort of George Washington look. “The whole effect is real George,” she wrote.
Caftans were the rage in 1966, and later that year, short pantsuits. When, in the late 1960s, Manhattan restaurants were turning away ladies who lunched if they showed up in pantsuits — never mind shorts — Ms. Peterson put together a photographic essay showing models being shunned by restaurant maîtres d’.
In 1969, she wrote a how-to on tie-dye.
Ms. Peterson was an early booster of André Courrèges, ballet flats and strapless swimwear. For Fashions of The Times, the seasonal stand-alone section of The New York Times Magazine, she introduced readers to photographers like Cecil Beaton, Diane Arbus, Hiro and Francesco Scavullo. But her most frequent collaborator was her husband, Gösta Peterson, the iconoclastic Swedish-born photographer.
In March 1967, when Twiggy, the waifish British supermodel, flew to the United States, Ms. Peterson joined the press scrum to meet her at Kennedy Airport. Although Twiggy was lined up to appear in Vogue, Ms. Peterson managed to nab her for her first American fashion shoot, for Fashions of The Times, commissioning her husband to do the honors.
The Petersons had two hours to get it done. Ms. Peterson grabbed a short, black sweater dress and a crisp, black Adolfo hat. Mr. Peterson made a collage of the photographs he took: Twiggy stretched out in her minidress laid over a close-up of her singular face.
The photos appeared in the magazine in April 1967. It was quite a get. Vogue’s Twiggy cover would not appear until July.
Ms. Peterson made history when, under her direction, Fashions of The Times became the first major American fashion magazine to put a photograph of a Black model on the cover: 19-year-old Naomi Sims, shot by Mr. Peterson.
It’s an arresting image: a regal Ms. Sims, clad in a flowing black cloak and wide-brimmed hat, gazes unsmilingly at the reader. In 2009, the photo was part of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “The Model as Muse.” The curators described the photo, and Ms. Sims’s powerful, elongated silhouette, as an example of Black pride in “the once-exclusionary pages of high-fashion journals.”
In 1970, however, Ms. Peterson clashed with Times editors when she wanted to use an Arbus photo of a white girl and a Black boy holding hands in a children’s fashion supplement of The New York Times Magazine.
“As for the miscegenation, junior style,” Ms. Arbus wrote to her ex-husband, Allan Arbus, detailing Ms. Peterson’s battle, “it may end up being regarded as a major civil rights breakthrough, if they finally let it pass.”
The editors did not.
Still, Ms. Peterson and Andrea Skinner, whom she had hired away from Mademoiselle magazine to work on children’s fashion, were able to diversify the races of the models shown in those pages. (For nearly half a century, Ms. Skinner, known as Andy, was the only Black fashion reporter at the paper.)
In 1977, Ms. Peterson left The Times for Henri Bendel, the emporium, on Manhattan’s 57th Street at the time, that had been transformed by Geraldine Stutz, its president, into one of the most enticing and innovative department stores in the country. With her Street of Shops, a collection of free-standing boutiques on the main floor, perfumed with the spicy orange potpourri that became the store’s signature scent, Ms. Stutz pioneered retail as theater.
Ms. Peterson, who was hired as an executive in the advertising and marketing department, began to create ads with her husband to convey that sensibility.
The couple’s Bendel ads ran each Sunday in the first section of The Times, and readers anticipated them with delight. They were whimsical, antic and often surreal. Models cavorted with butterflies, beach balls and terriers in images that were more like fashion magazine features than traditional department store advertisements.
Bendel’s windows were their own mini-theaters, overseen by Robert Curry and then Robert Rufino. But in the summer of 1978, Ms. Peterson was in charge, and one week she invited Edward Gorey, the ghoulish cartoonist, to have his way there. That involved embellishing mannequins with homemade bats and frogs, black-and-green Zoran shifts, and sleek black wigs, which pleased Ms. Peterson, a Sybil of trend spotters.
She told The Times, “Small heads are coming in.”
“Pat was a pioneer, and she didn’t know it,” Wendy Goodman, the design editor of New York magazine, said in an interview. “And she didn’t care.”
Patricia Ann Louis was born on June 6, 1926, in Chicago, the only child of Marion (Strunk) and LeRoi Louis, an engineer.
She was a fine arts major at Northwestern University and the fashion editor of The Purple Parrot, a student magazine. After graduating in 1948, she went to work for Marshall Field, the department store, in its fashion merchandising office. In 1950, after a brief marriage to a fellow Northwestern student, she moved to New York City, where she was hired as an associate fashion editor at Mademoiselle.
She met Mr. Peterson at a cocktail party in Greenwich Village. He was not a social animal; she found him in the host’s garden, weeding in his tweed suit. They married in 1954.
Voluble and energetic, Ms. Peterson was a foil to her husband, who was gruff and taciturn. They worked seamlessly together, a yin-and-yang team. “I don’t think he could have been who he was without her,” Ms. Goodman said.
In 1986, when Henri Bendel was sold to the Limited, Ms. Stutz left the company, and so did most of her staff, including Ms. Peterson, who joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a docent. She worked in the museum’s Costume Institute until 2015.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by a son, Jan. Mr. Peterson died in 2017.
“I think that clothes show how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about life,” Ms. Peterson said in The Times’s oral history. “If you wear something that you can move in and that you can feel attractive in, I think you feel much better about yourself, and I think you get things done faster.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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