ELEANOR LAMBERT

Eleanor Lambert was a publicist who decided, more than once, that American fashion needed an institution, and then made one. Four of the things she began are still running: the International Best Dressed List, New York Fashion Week, the Costume Institute Benefit and the Council of Fashion Designers of America.

She came to New York from Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1925 and went into advertising, working mostly with artists and galleries. In the middle of the 1930s she was the first press director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she helped found the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Dealers Association of America. Jackson Pollock, Jacob Epstein and Isamu Noguchi were among the artists she represented. She came to fashion from the art world, and brought its forms with her: the list, the showing, the opening night.

The list came first. In the 1940s she founded the International Best Dressed List and the Coty Fashion Critics’ Award, which became the CFDA Awards.

The showing came in 1943. The Germans held Paris, and the American fashion press could not get there. Lambert was press director of the New York Dress Institute, an association of garment unions and manufacturers, and she took the absence of Paris as an opening. She gathered American designers in front of the national and regional press and called it Press Week. Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, which had filled their pages with French clothes for decades, began printing Americans, and Norman Norell and Claire McCardell became names. It is New York Fashion Week now, and the Almanac counts it the oldest fashion week in the world.

The opening night came in 1948. The Costume Institute, founded in 1937 as the Museum of Costume Art, had joined the Metropolitan Museum two years before. Lambert gave it a benefit: a midnight supper at fifty dollars a ticket, which she called the Party of the Year. For its first decades it “was simply one of many annual benefits held for New York charitable institutions.” It is the Met Gala now, and in 2026 it raised forty-two million dollars for the department, a record for the evening.

In 1962 she organised the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In 1959 and 1967 the State Department asked her to present American fashion abroad, for the first time in Russia, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, Britain and Switzerland, and in 1965 President Johnson appointed her to the National Council on the Arts.

The evening the fashion world remembers was given for a building. In November 1973 the Palace of Versailles needed sixty million dollars of repairs the French government would not pay for, and Lambert proposed a fundraiser: five French houses against five American ones, on one stage, before seven hundred people. Marie-Hélène de Rothschild organised the French side. America sent de la Renta, Halston, Blass, Anne Klein and Stephen Burrows, all of them Lambert’s clients, and most of them regarded in Paris as makers of sportswear. Their scenery did not fit the stage. They went on with recorded music, pools of light and ten Black models, and Women’s Wear Daily put the Americans on its front page.

What she left the season is a pattern as much as a set of dates. A fixed night; a press invited to see it; a room filled by invitation; and the money raised for an institution rather than for the hosts. New York’s spring and autumn are still arranged around the shows she began, and its benefits still follow the evening she gave the Costume Institute. The Charity Gala Dinner the Court will give in November opens its own entry with her.

She kept the List until the end, leaving it, months before she died, to four of Vanity Fair’s editors. Her last public appearance was at New York Fashion Week, in September 2003. She died a few weeks later, aged one hundred.