Gloria Vanderbilt Dies at 95; Built a Fashion Empire

Gloria Vanderbilt in 1978. In the mid-1970s, when jeans were cut mostly for men, the clothing manufacturer Mohan Murjani signed Ms. Vanderbilt to market jeans for women with her 

signature on the back pocket. She set new trends in apparel marketing

Gloria Vanderbilt, the society heiress who stitched her illustrious family name into designer jeans and built a $100 million fashion empire, crowning her tabloid story of a child-custody fight, of broken marriages and of jet-set romances, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her son Anderson Cooper, the CNN journalist, in a broadcast.

To millions of women (and men) who wore her jeans, blouses, scarves, shoes, jewelry and perfumes, who saw her alabaster face, jet-black hair and slim figure in magazines, and who watched her move across a television screen and proclaim that her svelte jeans “really hug your derrière,” Ms. Vanderbilt was an alluring, faintly naughty fashion diva in the 1970s.

But behind the flair and the practiced, throaty whisper — a plummy voice redolent of Miss Porter’s School and summers in Newport — there were hints of a little girl from the 1930s who stuttered terribly, too shy and miserable to express her feelings, and of a tumultuous American life chronicled faithfully in the gossip columns: every twist of her Hollywood affairs, her loneliness

Eventually, too, the press reported on her real successes in the fashion industry — and on her late-in-life tax, legal and money problems — and re-examined her life of turmoil with deeper interest. There were laudatory reviews of her memoirs, which looked back on the painful betrayals of lovers, husbands and her parents — a playboy father she never knew and a negligent teenage mother, whom she forgave.

She was America’s most famous non-Hollywood child in the Roaring Twenties and Depression years, the great-great-granddaughter of the 19th-century railroad and steamship magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. In infancy, she inherited a $2.5 million trust fund, equivalent to $37 million today, which she could not touch until she was 21, though her mother gained access to nearly $50,000 a year

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