Legendary Fashion Editor Polly Mellen Passes Away
Legendary fashion editor Polly Mellen has passed away. She was 100 years old.
Born Polly Allen in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1924, she was a graduate of Miss Porter's School, the tony all-girls boarding school, which also boasts Jackie Kennedy, Lee Radziwill, and Lilly Pulitzer as alums. After graduation, Mellen began work as a nurse's aide, but quickly shifted to a career in retail with a job at Lord & Taylor, before eventually finding her way into the world of magazines.
Her parents were not in fashion, “but they were enormously chic,” she said in a 2010 interview. Reminiscing on her childhood, she shared, “I always took a great interest in my clothes. My sister, who was 13 months older, and I always dressed alike, but as I got a little bit older, I didn’t like that because I wanted to dress differently. So our mother would put Patty in blue and Polly in pink, or we would wear complementary colors, but the shapes we were wearing were always the same, and I was very interested in that.”
After a storied career in publishing, with stints not just at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, but also Allure and Mademoiselle, she retired at age 77, saying, “I really didn’t want to do mediocre stuff, which is what a lot of the projects I was offered were. I said to myself, ‘That’s it. Go to the country, be with your family, and live a life, rather than mediocrity.’”
Mellen received a lifetime achievement award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1994. In an interview earlier this year, she reflected on her style. “My approach was very often a bit avant-garde, shall we say. And because of that, I was an editor who was different,” she said. On what shaped her eye, she explained, “I loved the street. I felt that there was so much going on in the street that gave me insight into real life.”
As Vogue wrote in their obituary, “Mellen herself was never content with the status quo, and she pushed the boundaries of fashion in exciting new directions, leaving behind footprints that are still being followed today.”
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