The Empress of Fashion, Miss Eleanor Lambert
Before there was the Fashion Week, before there was Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Calvin Klein and Helston, before there was the CFDA, before there was the Best Dressed List, there was just her, Eleanor Lambert Berkson. She may have started her career as a publicist, but it didn’t take long to be established as the Empress of Fashion or the Empress of Seventh Avenue. It was her that made American Fashion international and New York the capital of fashion. It’s been 11 years since she died, but the legacy she left to the fashion world, will be eternal.
The List. In 1940, Eleanor Lambert, found the International Best Dressed List. It’s about an annual list of the best wardrobes in the world where editors and people of fashion vote and nominate the most stylish of them. For the history, that list is an expanded version of the Parisian world’s ten best-dress women, in the 1920s. Back to the 40s, the International Best Dressed List was something really innovative in the history of fashion and 74 years later, is still a great honor to be a part of it. Months before she died, she had left the control of the International Best Dressed List in the Vanity Fair’s editors.
The Fashion Week. While the French designers ruled the fashion world back to the 1940s, Miss Lambert unerringly believed that American designers deserved to be showcased equally as the French. So, in 1943 was introduced the idea of Fashion Weeks. Primarily, it was called “Press Week” and the shows were only for fashion journalisms. Held twice a year, the Press Week was such a success, that fashion magazines like Vogue, which was full of the French fashion, progressively introduced to everyone American designs. It was the time New York has been established among the fashion capitals internationally.
The CFDA. As we said, Miss Lambert believed in the American designers and she was always trying to convince the world that American fashion industry was as influential as its international counterparts. The Council of Fashion Designers of America is an undeniable proof of that effort, which she found in 1962 and ran it for more than a decade. A couple of years before she died, in 2001 the CFDA created The Eleanor Lambert Awardwhich is awarded for “a unique contribution to the world of fashion and/or deserves the industry’s special recognition” as it’s written by John Tiffany for the history of the CFDA.
While her motto was “don’t look back”, Miss Eleanor Lambert spent her entire life trying to establish the American fashion among the other fashion capitals, and she made it with a great success. Some of the most talented American designers, such as Norman Norell, Oscar de La Renta, Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, owe their outshine mostly to her. With her trademark turbans and outsize jewelry, Eleanor Lambert Berkson, as it’s her full name, was, is and will be one of the most influential women in the American fashion industry. She died at her home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on October 7, 2003 at the age of 100.
