Laura
Bambrough (April 28, 1964 – March 17, 2014), known professionally as L'Wren
Scott, was an American fashion designer, costume designer and model. Previously
a celebrity stylist, Scott's fashion design following included a clientele of
high profile actors and politicians.
Scott was
named Laura Bambrough by her Mormon adoptive parents, Ivan and Lula Bambrough,
who raised her in Roy , Utah 6
ft 0 in
(1.83 m )
in height by the age of twelve, and would eventually grow to 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m ).
At the
suggestion of photographer Bruce Weber who spotted Scott at a Calvin Klein
photo shoot, she left Utah after graduating
from high school for Paris Paris
Scott moved
to California
In 2009,
she contributed designs for Madonna to wear in her photo shoot with model Jesus
Luz for W Magazine and in 2011, Scott styled actress Julia Roberts for a W
Magazine shoot, alongside Tom Hanks. She designed costumes for such films as
Diabolique (1996 remake), Ocean's Thirteen, Eyes Wide Shut, as well as Shine a
Light, a documentary by Martin Scorsese about The Rolling Stones, with Mick
Jagger, with whom she had been romantically linked since 2001.
Scott's
first collection as a clothing designer was called "Little Black
Dress", launched in 2006. The collection presented an array of black
dresses, including her now famous "Headmistress" dress worn by
Madonna. Sarah Jessica Parker, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman,Penélope Cruz and
Amy Adams have all worn Scott's dresses to the Academy Awards. Other
celebrities who have worn Scott's designs include Michelle Obama,[11] Carla
Bruni-Sarkozy, Naomi Campbell, Reese Witherspoon, Christina Hendricks, Jennifer
Lopez, Sandra Bullock and Uma Thurman.
In 2010,
Scott collaborated with Lancôme to create a capsule collection for the 2010
holiday season featuring a lipstick in Scott's signature bordeaux
Scott
collaborated with Banana Republic with an exclusive holiday collection
including apparel and accessories for women.
In February
2014, the London Fashion Week showing of her fall 2014 collection was canceled.
Scott was
found dead by her assistant at her apartment in Chelsea ,
Manhattan 10 a .m.
on March 17, 2014 when she found L'Wren hanging by the door handle with a scarf
wound around her neck. The police reported that no note was found and there was
no sign of foul play. The New York City Chief Medical Examiner determined
Scott's manner and cause of death to be suicide by hanging. She was 49.
She left
her entire estate, estimated at about US$9 million, to her longtime boyfriend,
Mick Jagger.
Scott's
funeral service was held at the Hollywood
Forever Cemetery
in Los Angeles , California Ogden , Utah
L'Wren Scott: the mysterious suicide of Mick Jagger's
girlfriend
In the months
since fashion designer L'Wren Scott killed herself, her extraordinary life and
achievements have been overshadowed by her relationship with Mick Jagger.
Elizabeth Day travels to New York
Elizabeth
Day
The
Observer, Sunday 22 June 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/jun/22/lwren-scott-mysterious-suicide-of-mick-jaggers-girlfriend
 |
'She was found fully clothed, her tall
frame slumped on the floor. Paramedics were unable to do anything': L'Wren
Scott. Photograph: Donato Sardella/WireImage
|
She didn't
leave a note. Three months after the fashion designer L'Wren Scott's suicide,
this has been one of the hardest things for her friends to bear.
Partly it
just seems so out of character. Those who knew her describe Scott as
"thoughtful", "kind" and "sweet-natured". She
would remember birthdays or send out-of-the-blue texts saying that she was
thinking of you. When she spoke, you felt you had the entirety of her
attention. If she liked you, Scott would go out of her way to help.
Her friend
and hairdresser John Vial recalls that she was always trying to introduce him
to "wealthy billionaires" who would help him expand his business.
"She'd send me a text saying: 'Oh my God, I saw this person, I'm
introducing you to him.' Or it would be: 'I've found this new cream – try it,
take it, take, take, take.' She was just a kind, thoughtful girl, really."
Simon
Kneen, the former creative director at Banana Republic, who became close to
Scott when he worked with her on a collaboration for the store last year, has a
particular memory of a long, stressful day of photo shoots that started early
and ended late.
"It
was actually my birthday," he says. "And when I got home, there was
this beautiful bouquet of peonies she'd arranged to be sent to my
apartment."
At her
memorial service in New York
Her talent,
says Joanna Coles, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan in the US
"She
gave an impression of a certain serenity," agrees the respected fashion
critic Suzy Menkes, "which is so out of tune with her sad death".
In an
industry re-nowned for its superficiality and occasional bitchiness, for its
hectic pace and consumer-driven culture, Scott's calmness and consideration for
other people set her apart. She didn't need to care – at 49, she was glamorous,
successful and had a superstar boyfriend in the form of Mick Jagger. Her
red-carpet gowns, known for their classic tailoring and sumptuous detailing,
were worn by Hollywood A-listers including Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman
and Renée Zellweger, and Scott had just dressed Christina Hendricks for the
2014 Academy Awards.
Although
her business was accumulating debt, she was, to all intents and purposes,
wealthy. She owned her $5.6m New York 11th Avenue Paris and London Paris
All of
which suggests a certain lifestyle, played out at a remove from the everyday.
But, says Kneen: "She was never a diva. She was a great listener and
interested in everyone from pattern makers through to seamstresses and
designers… She wasn't pretentious. My team used to love working with her."
So it seems
odd that Scott would choose such a brutal way to end her life. Odd, too, that
she would text her assistant, Brittany Penebre, at 8.30 on the morning of her
death, asking her to come round. It was Monday 17 March and by the time Penebre
got to the apartment at 10am, Scott was dead. She was found fully clothed, her
6ft 3in frame slumped on the floor, having hanged herself with a black silk
scarf. Penebre called for an ambulance, but the paramedics were unable to do
anything. Later Scott's body was removed from the building for autopsy, the
blue-and-white medical examiner's van nudging its way through a gathering crowd
of photographers.
As news of
her death spread, Scott's friends were left reeling. No one had anticipated it.
She had just returned from a holiday in Mustique. The night before her death,
she'd held a dinner party for close friends. They were concerned about her –
she seemed down, sightly troubled, perhaps – but there was no sign of what was
going to happen, just hours later, in the same apartment.
The day
after her death, Jagger, who was on tour with the Rolling Stones in Australia
 |
‘Still struggling to understand how my
lover and best friend could end her life in this tragic way’: Jagger with Scott
in 2012. Photograph: Lan/Corbis
|
Some seized
on financial problems as the most likely reason for her death. The UK arm of her company, LS Fashion Ltd (set up in
2006), had a deficit of £3.5m, and she had cancelled her show at London
The New
York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn claimed Scott was demoralised by the
difficulties besetting her business and had been planning to close it down – a
claim denied by Scott's spokesperson, who said that at the time of her death
"the long-term prospects for the business were encouraging", in part
due to the designer's expanding portfolio of brand partnerships, with Banana
Republic and the cosmetics firm Bobbi Brown, among others.
Kneen
insists that the debts were not particularly significant for that kind of
start-up. Scott, he says, was "really at the start of her career".
Besides, if
she genuinely were in financial crisis, there were always going to be people
who would bail her out – not least Jagger himself. The debt, such as it was,
didn't seem enough of a reason for Scott to take her own life.
"I
just don't know why she would do it," says Vial, shaking his head. "I
could not be any more shocked. I had no inkling at all. None, none, none."
The only
way he can make sense of it is to think that it was an impulsive act. "I
just don't think she meant to do it," he says, and there is a helplessness
to his tone, an underlying desperation to eke out some kind of unhappy logic
from the mess. "It was a moment of madness. I don't think she knew…"
He trails off.
It's the
thing they all keep coming back to: the strangeness of it, the fact that Scott
– so compassionate, so kind, so seemingly serene – had texted her assistant
without imagining the trauma of the discovery that would await her, without
worrying about the effect it might have. It was so out of character. All of it.
And there was no note to explain why.
In his book
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, the writer Al Alvarez argues that "the
decision to take your own life is as vast and complex and mysterious as life
itself".
In the case
of L'Wren Scott, the mystery of her death is heightened by a deeper
unknowability. For all that she was loving and loved, admiring and admired, her
friends were aware there were things she chose not to share. She was extremely
private and adept at putting up a front. Her estranged adoptive sister, Jan
Shane, described Scott in a recent newspaper interview as "a super-strong
woman… [You] don't see the other side of her and she isn't going to tell
you."
She had
"a guarded core", wrote Bridget Foley, the executive editor of
Women's Wear Daily in the aftermath of Scott's death. Sarah Jessica Parker
recalled at Scott's memorial service at St Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue that there was a mysteriousness to her which
was hard to pin down, marked by "silent boundaries" her friends would
know not to cross. Occasionally this distance could be interpreted as froideur.
"Her
strongest tool was the power of silence," says Vial. "Even if she
wasn't angry, she just said things with a sense of authority."
And there
was the extraordinary physical presence, too – Scott was well over 6ft in her
bare feet, with waist-length dark hair and the languid elegance of a ballerina.
She didn't feel the need to ingratiate herself and wasn't especially impressed
by the trappings of fame. She had a dry, ironic sense of humour, much given to
an arched eyebrow and a sarcastic one-liner.
 |
On the red carpet: at
|
When she first met Jagger, on a 2001 photo
shoot, she had little knowledge of his back catalogue. Later, when they were
dating, they attended a fashion show in Paris
She was her own woman, then, and
uninterested in being known purely as a rock'n'roll appendage. There were some
who took exception to what they perceived as her coldness. Keith Richards was
rumoured to call her "Le Man" and to tease her about the size of her
feet. There were others who referred to her dismissively as "the
apostrophe" and complained that she exercised too great an influence over
Jagger's decisions. He was, they say, more reserved and less fun when Scott was
present.
Her perfectionism could make her controlling.
When she designed Jagger's on-stage outfits, Scott ripped up 25 pairs of jeans
before she was satisfied with the final version. When she renovated the
couple's Left Bank apartment in Paris, she took nine months choosing the paint
for the drawing room, evaluating what shade looked best in various lights,
weathers and seasons (in the end, she opted for four subtly different shades of
grey).
But those who knew her insist the standards
she set herself sprang from an innate insecurity. This, after all, was a woman
who had been given up for adoption at birth. However happy Scott's subsequent
upbringing might have been, some people in that situation have a hard time
getting over the initial rejection and feel a constant need to prove their
worth.
Perfectionism is a common ailment, too,
among successful women. For some, the exhausting business of never feeling
quite enough is appeased by motherhood. Although Scott never talked about
having children or the unsubstantiated rumours that Jagger was incapable of
long-term fidelity, some of her circle believed she wanted a baby. Jagger has
seven children by four different women and four grandchildren. His first
great-grandchild was born in May.
Scott was, by all accounts, an attentive
and loving presence in their lives. She took pride in the children's
achievements, telling friends when Georgia May, Jagger's model daughter, had a
new magazine cover out and attending his grandson Zak's first baseball game in
the months before she died. The eight-year-old Zak called Scott
"Glammy" – an affectionate contraction of "glamour" and
"Granny".
Menkes recalls that Scott had "a very
good, easy relationship" with Jagger's children – "not motherly, just
natural". But there were signs that Scott wanted more.
"There were two times, the whole time
that I knew her, when I saw… I wouldn't say the mask slipping, but perhaps a
bit of what was actually behind her," says one close friend.
"One was when she showed me around her
Paris
"The second time was at her Île
Saint-Louis showroom three years ago. She seemed very depressed and unlike
herself, quite insecure and generally upset. I was so worried about her I
actually asked a mutual friend: 'Is she OK?' and they said it was probably just
Mick playing up again. These are the only obvious things I remember as signs that
she wasn't jogging on happily with her life."
It says something about how cautiously
Scott guarded her private life that among her friends there is no consensus
over whether she and Jagger had split up or not. I am told with equal certainty
that they "definitely had called time on their relationship" a few
weeks before her death and, from different sources, that any suggestion they
were no longer a couple is "100% false". Jagger's spokesman, Bernard
Doherty, has openly dismissed rumours of a split as "absurd".
However, stories have recently emerged of Jagger becoming close to a
27-year-old ballet dancer, Melanie Hamrick, whom he is said to have met while
on tour in Japan
In spite of this, one of Scott's confidantes
insists that the notion of a split was "truly unbelievable. I would be
less shocked if the Pope decided to be a Muslim. They were great together. They
were like kids. She would light up any time he walked into a room. It was like:
ting!" In many ways, the friend continues, it would be preferable if there
had been a rupture "because at least it would be an explanation, wouldn't
it?"
If she was depressed, Scott managed to hide
it from most people. And the truth was that even if Scott could have made sense
of what she was feeling, she might not have wanted to share it with anyone. It
was that "guarded core" which drew her to fashion in the first place.
Her clothes reflected this aspect of her personality: beautifully constructed
to flatter the wearer but always concealing more than they revealed. Each
carefully crafted piece required an enormous amount of work and attention to
detail in order to maintain the illusion of grace. They were one-offs. And so,
in her own way, was L'Wren Scott.
She was raised Luann Bambrough in Roy,
Utah, a city with a population of 37,000 situated alongside Interstate 15.
Scott's adoptive father, Ivan, was a Second World War veteran who worked as an
account executive for an insurance company and her mother, Lula, was a bank clerk.
Both were active in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Scott's siblings – Jan
and Randall – were also adopted, and all three went to the local high school.
It was a modest upbringing and Scott soon
outgrew her surroundings. At the age of 12, she was already 6ft and towering
above her 5ft 1in mother. At the cinema she would be charged more for a ticket
because the ushers didn't believe she was a child.
"She was frequently made fun of
because of her height," recalls her childhood friend Julie Nichols Thompson.
"She seemed to take it in her stride. I wouldn't say she was maliciously
bullied, but she was often called Stretch or asked: 'How's the weather up
there?'"
Her height meant that store-bought clothes
didn't fit. Her mother encouraged her to start adapting Butterick patterns and
remodelling men's suits for her frame.
"She loved her mum," says Vial.
"Her mother used to say to her: 'Stand up straight, shoulders back, get
your heels on!' She was very close to her mother, I think.
"Certainly there was no taboo. I don't
think that she had any issues about being adopted. She never vocalised them to
me."
Nichols Thompson says the only time it came
up was when peers would ask whether Scott had tall parents. "She loved and
respected her [adoptive] parents," she says. "Confidence was one of
her great attributes."
Scott was funny and outgoing, with a
diverse group of friends. She made no secret of the fact that she believed her
future lay beyond Utah
 |
‘Her mum used to say: “Stand up straight,
shoulders back, get your heels on!” They were very close’: with her adoptive
parents and siblings. Photograph: Splash News/Corbis
"The local swimming pool was across
from my house. We met our friends there nearly every day during the
summer," says Nichols Thompson. "We were constantly trying to get the
attention of the lifeguards by pretending to be attacked by a shark, feigning
drowning, or 'accidentally' splashing them. We would position ourselves right
under the lifeguard chair and hang our elbows over the edge of the pool with
our legs extended and begin kicking to see how wet we could get the lifeguard
before he reprimanded us. L'Wren's legs were most efficient in creating a
splash zone.
"One time we were piling into the back
of a two-door Chevy. As the young man tipped the driver's seat forward to let
us in, L'Wren looked at the small space and then offered to unscrew her legs
and put them in the trunk."
In 1985, when she was 18, Scott was spotted
by the legendary photographer Bruce Weber on a trip to Utah Paris
She was featured in an iconic advertisement
for Pretty Polly hosiery, shot by David Bailey, where her legs were pictured as
the hands of a clock.
"We saw thousands of girls,"
Bailey recalls, "and she had the best legs in the world. It was a
difficult job because I was 30ft up in the sky shooting down on her, and she
didn't complain once. I was surprised when she died. She seemed quite together
to me."
In the mid-90s Scott moved to Los Angeles
There was a brief marriage in 1993 to
property entrepreneur Anthony Brand, but the couple divorced after three years.
In 2001 she met Jagger on a photo shoot. Five years later, with his support,
she set up her own label.
Her trips back to Utah
"I would think she'd be pretty fed up
by the 'Mick's girlfriend' tag, but that's just a guess," says Menkes.
"I never heard her say anything against Mick, ever."
It was clear that she adored him. Her
modelling days left her with an instinctive understanding of silhouette, and in
most of the photographs that survive of them as a couple, Scott is bending
gracefully at the knee to distract attention from the obvious height
difference. She took joy, say friends, in making things beautiful. In many
ways, she was her own most brilliant creation.
"I never saw her shabby or in
tracksuit bottoms," laughs Vial. Her fashion shows were, he says,
"beyond chic". Scott would always provide a lunch for her attendees,
serving baked potatoes with caviar or chicken pot pie. The attention to detail
was staggering: vast bowls of roses, individual waiters for each guest and, of
course, the tantalising prospect of Jagger being in attendance. But for all the
stunning surface detail of her life, and the sense she gave of being in control
and gilded and lucky, Scott had an underlying fragility.
"She would be really hurt if somebody
said something unkind," adds Vial. "Like many powerful women, she was
sensitive."
In the months before her death, Scott's
emotional fragility was matched for the first time by a physical frailty. She
underwent an operation to repair a torn meniscus in her knee. For weeks she was
hobbling around on crutches.
"I think it was the first time she
felt her body was giving up on her," says an acquaintance. "She was
due to turn 50 in
April, which could also have been playing on her mind."
Still, she carried on working. She kept in
touch with friends. She emailed André Leon Talley on 4 January saying she'd
just dropped off "my grandson Zak" at the airport to fly back to Los Angeles London
It was the last communication he ever had
with her.
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