Grace Mirabella, Who Brought Vogue Down to Earth, Dies
at 92
In her 17 years at the helm of the fashion magazine,
she took a more practical-minded approach, in line with a rise in women’s
participation in the work force.
By Phyllis
Messinger
Dec. 23,
2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/fashion/grace-mirabella-dead.html
Grace
Mirabella, who as editor in chief transformed Vogue magazine from a glittery,
color-splashed paean to the spirit of the 1960s into a more sensible adviser to
women entering the work force in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Thursday at her
home in Manhattan. She was 92.
The death
was confirmed by her stepson Anthony Cahan.
Ms.
Mirabella went on to found Mirabella, a magazine for women as interested in
culture and travel as in clothes and interior design. But she made her biggest
impact at Vogue. Her years there, from 1971 to 1988, coincided with women’s
increasing financial independence. Many women were among the first in their
families to work outside the home and were looking for guidance on a range of
issues, starting with what to wear to their new jobs. Go-go boots and love
beads would not do; they needed more practical clothes that fit their new
lifestyles.
At the same
time, as these women participated in the broader world, their interests
widened, too. But Vogue, under its flamboyant editor Diana Vreeland, had
entered the ’70s still stuck in the ’60s. The magazine’s circulation was
falling, and advertising along with it.
Even so,
Ms. Vreeland’s firing by Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, in 1971 came without
warning. The move was so abrupt that Ms. Mirabella, Ms. Vreeland’s second in
command, was notified of her promotion while on a photo shoot in California.
Where Ms.
Vreeland was colorful, electric and theatrical, Ms. Mirabella was pragmatic and
businesslike. Her mandate was to change the character of the magazine, and
Vogue quickly took on the values of its new editor, becoming more accessible
and down to earth.
To signal
the new mood, Ms. Mirabella had the red walls of the editor’s office repainted
beige, and she often wore tailored beige clothes to work.
“I’m not a
clothes girl if it means talking about them all the time,” she said in an
interview shortly after her appointment. “But I think they’re interesting, and
I have quite a lot of them.”
Ms.
Mirabella’s Vogue emphasized the natural in hairstyles, makeup and clothing
over artifice — the spare designs of Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Giorgio
Armani over fashion as fantasy or work of art.
The
magazine added sections on the arts, fitness, health and beauty while keeping
its emphasis on fashion. Circulation tripled during Ms. Mirabella’s tenure, to
more than 1.2 million in 1988 from 400,000 in 1971.
But while
she was considered the most powerful woman in fashion, she kept the focus on
fashion and not herself, said Samir Husni, a professor of journalism and
director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi
School of Journalism. “She was an icon, a legacy,” Professor Husni said in an
interview for this obituary.
She was
also hard-working.
“Nobody,”
he said, “ever wrote a book about her, ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’” a reference to
the novel, later made into a movie, based on Ms. Mirabella’s successor at
Vogue, Anna Wintour. “She wore the Prada without the devil.”
By the
mid-1980s, though, the pendulum of fashion had swung again. There was new money
and a new interest in the comings and goings of celebrities. Fashion was
becoming more about trendiness, and Vogue was not reflecting these
sensibilities.
Though it
still dominated the world of fashion magazines, Vogue was facing new
competition. One of its competitors, American Elle, had become a force almost
overnight, with an emphasis on a youthful European approach.
Elle was
introduced in September 1985; by the end of the next year, its paid circulation
was 861,000. In June 1988, Ms. Mirabella
was ousted — as abruptly as Ms. Vreeland had been before her — and replaced
with Ms. Wintour, 20 years her junior. Ms. Wintour had been creative director
at Vogue from 1983 to 1986 before becoming editor of British Vogue and then
House & Garden (which was renamed HG in 1988).
In an
interview after the move, S.I. Newhouse Jr., the chairman of Condé Nast, made
no apologies, saying it was time to “reposition Vogue for the ’90s.”
“There have
been clear lines of what was high fashion and casual fashion,” Mr. Newhouse
said. “I think those lines are less apparent now. I think the change in the
1990s, when we look back, will be as decisive as the shift from the ’60s to the
’70s.”
A few
months later, Ms. Mirabella announced that she would launch her own
publication. Mirabella magazine, which was backed by Rupert Murdoch, was meant
to be about “much more than clothes or interior design,” she wrote in the
inaugural issue, dated May 1989. It was to be about style, she said, which
“informs every aspect of our lives,” and it would offer serious articles along
with fashion and beauty advice.
Ms.
Mirabella never explicitly stated what age group her magazine was aimed at, but
she did say that it was targeted at educated women concerned with politics,
psychology and business.
She left
the magazine in 1996 to lecture and do freelance writing. The magazine, which
never turned a profit and often struggled to find a coherent voice, was shut
down in 2000.
But
Professor Husni said that the mere existence of the magazine reflected Ms.
Mirabella’s stature in the industry. “I give a lot of credit to Rupert
Murdoch,” he said. “When you’re on your way out, no one honors you. But that’s
how important she was.”
Marie Grace
Mirabella was born on June 10, 1929, in Newark, the daughter of Anthony
Mirabella, a sales manager for a liquor importing company, and Florence
(Belfatto) Mirabella, who had immigrated from Italy.
Shortly
after graduating from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1950 with
a bachelor’s degree in economics, she joined the executive training program at
Macy’s. She then briefly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue before taking a job at
Vogue in 1952 verifying store credits in photo captions.
She was on
the public relations staff of the designers Simonetta & Fabiani in Rome
from 1954 to 1955 before returning to Vogue in 1955 as the shopping editor,
searching small shops for unusual fare. With a reputation for working hard, she
climbed her way up through a succession of jobs at the magazine.
In November
1974 she married William G. Cahan, a thoracic surgeon who specialized in breast
and lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Dr.
Cahan was an early leader in national efforts to combat smoking.
In addition
to her stepson Anthony Cahan, she is survived by another stepson, Christopher
Cahan; seven step-grandchildren; and three step-great-grandchildren.
In her book
“In and Out of Vogue” (1995), written with Judith Warner, Ms. Mirabella settled
some scores from her days at the magazine. She described Ms. Wintour as “a
vision of skinniness in black sunglasses and Chanel suits” and claimed that the
photographer Richard Avedon had “achieved some of his best results with girls
who were utterly strung out on dope.”
As to the
reasons she was pushed from her perch, she wrote that the 1980s were “an
emperor-has-no-clothes era, start to finish.” Clothes, she said, “were about
labels, designers were about being celebrities, and it was all, on a bigger and
bigger scale, about money.”
Fashion had
degenerated, she wrote, “into a self-reverential game full of jokes and
pastiches that amused the fashion community enormously and did nothing at all
for the woman shopping and trying to find something to wear.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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