Intrepid Fashion Editor Polly Mellen Dies at 100
The ever-direct fashion editor, a front-row fixture at fashion shows and one of the industry’s most ebullient cheerleaders, Polly Mellen, has died at the age of 100.
Mellen, who had been diagnosed with skin cancer last summer, passed away on Dec. 12 at the assisted living facility Noble Horizons in Salisbury, CT., according to her daughter Leslie Bell. A tribute for Mellen, who will be laid to rest beside her second huband Henry Wigglesworth Mellen, is being planned for this summer in Kent, CT.
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Speaking of Mellen’s death, Condé Nast‘s chief content officer and global editorial director Anna Wintour said Thursday via email, “Polly was a mercurial grand dame with boundless energy and a deep love for her work and for the creative process. She was an adored figure at Vogue and a huge part of our history. Working with giants like Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, she was fearless on set: Nothing mattered more than the image, which might create beauty, or push boundaries, or do both at the same time.”
A troubadour in the field of fashion, Mellen proved herself time and again in the trenches and upper echelons with her expressive statements. Fittingly, she had worked as a nurse’s aide in a soldiers’ hospital during World War II. After an early post at Lord & Taylor, Mellen went on to leave her mark at Harper’s Bazaar, American Vogue and Allure. Her steely work ethic was of a first-to-arrive and last-to-leave ethos.
Mellen’s résumé included a stint at Harper’s Bazaar that started in 1951 under the esteemed Diana Vreeland, followed by 28 years at Vogue and then eight years as Allure’s creative director. In that last full-time post, Mellen also wrote the “Fashion Police” with another style powerhouse — the late Carrie Donovan. By her own account, Mellen did not have trouble finding her voice. So much so, that Avedon once complained that she was too noisy to work with. Needless to say, the creative pair heard each other out and created groundbreaking shoots for years.
Never one for nostalgia, Mellen was always in search of what’s next. She told WWD in 1999, “What’s hard is that you keep your eyes open and there can be no laziness. It’s not a matter of who you are or what you are. It’s not a matter of seniority — it’s a matter of performance.“
She also heeded hiring advice that the photographer Arthur Elgort once gave her — “drop something; if you pick it up quicker than they do, they’re not for you.” Mellen also heeded Carmel Snow’s career advice of “Go see every designer everywhere. You never know where the next talent is coming from. Open your eyes, have a little humility, and let go of ego.”
Her start at Vogue was also under Vreeland, but that was short-lived. After Vreeland was abruptly fired and replaced with one of her former assistants, Grace Mirabella, the office decor changed overnight from red walls and a leopard carpet to neutrals. “The next morning everything was beige, beige, beige,” Mellen told WWD. “I am not a beige person.”
Her first shoot at Vogue was a five-week trip to Asia with Avedon (who described her as the most creative sittings editor that he had ever worked with). The assignment was said to be the most expensive fashion shoot ever. The final edit included shots of Verushcka head-to-toe in white fur walking through the snowy mountains of Hokkaido. Another shot featured the model topless in the lotus position as a Japanese fortune teller looks down at her erotically. “There is a word that comes with being a strong editor. That word is responsibility,” Mellen said in 2002.
Part of her incentive to leave the then-secure world of magazine publishing was her interest in freelancing. However backward that might seem through today’s lens, when many enterprising creatives take a catch-as-catch-can approach to freelance and side gigs, Mellen came of age when top-tier editors were fully dedicated to their employers, striving for firsts with photography, models, designer collections and information. Upon exiting Allure in 1999, Mellen told WWD, “I love change, and I believe in change. Change is growth and hope. What we’ve seen already is such an ‘up.’ Change has to happen; nothing stands still.”
The Connecticut-born creative didn’t just help steer fashion, but she also contributed to how readers viewed the world and society. She was part of the team that shot a cover with the Black model Peggy Dillard in 1977. “The world was changing. Priorities were shifting,” Mellen once recalled of that time.
She shot a gap-toothed Lauren Hutton and later Patti Hansen before they became household names. Mellen pulled clothes from the magazine’s big advertisers and pulled from newcomers like Halston and Calvin Klein. Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren were a few other talents she praised. Mellen also ushered in photographers like Carter Smith, Tom Munro, Nathaniel Goldberg and Michael Thompson. Not about to name the most difficult model that she worked with, Mellen once intimated that Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway and Barbra Streisand weren’t exactly cupcakes.
When the initial test shots for a 1981 shoot with Nastassja Kinski weren’t great, Mellen went to her dressing room to ask if she had any favorite animals, which turned out to be snakes. After the model said she was game for a shoot with a snake, Mellen “ran down” to Avedon, and called an animal trainer to bring a snake to the set. Describing that shoot in 2012 during a “Fashion Icons” talk with Fern Mallis, Mellen said you could tell Kinski was “really fascinated and turned on by it. Holding this snake, I mean, you can’t believe it. It is so very seductive. Dick asked her if she would lie down and be nude with the snake. The snake wound up her body very slowly. Nobody was telling it what to do. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. When the snake got to her ear, he kissed her and put out his tongue. Then the shoot was over and I was crying.”
Avedon’s assistant of 15 years, Gideon Lewin, recalled Thursday the privilege of working with Mellen in Avedon’s studio and on location. “An amazing editor with a great eye, she was intense and totally focused on set, and she was a lot of fun off set.”
Describing Mellen as a mentor to many, Lewin remembered delivering contact sheets to Mellen for her to proof during Paris Fashion Week decades ago at the Hotel Crillon. “She was in bed, very happy and with a bottle of Champagne nearby.”
Innately able to recognize the essence of a collection and what works about it, Mellen always cut to the chase. When Mirabella started to lose her touch in the 1980s, when the economy was ailing and the pages were getting boring, Mellen sent a New York magazine editor — Wintour — to meet with Mirabella. In time, Wintour replaced Mirabella and brought in Grace Coddington as creative director, bumping Mellen to special projects editor. “I’m not dumb. You begin to realize that you’re a bit of an extra,” Mellen once told WWD, adding that Wintour was “very polite” about the whole thing, but the experience really stung.
With her signature white bob and questioning eyes, Mellen was unmistakable with her crisp minimalist style and quick pace. Case in point — her look of custom Gucci leather pants and an eccentrically gathered nude top would pass the on-trend test today for most Gen-Zers. And Mellen donned that look in her 70s. By her own account, she never believed in buying clothes for one season and throwing them out the next. “I can’t do that kind of shopping,” she told WWD in 2002. “I like glamorous classics, not fancy clothes.”
And she wasn’t above a pair of well-cut Levi’s. “You are never out of style in a pair of blue jeans. I don’t care what anyone says,” Mellen said in 2002.
Stan Herman said, “Fashion was food for her and her appetite was enormous, which is something that we don’t see so much today. She was able to come out of the back rooms, because of her personality and the time. We were discovering stylists for the first time. They weren’t part of anyone’s repertoire at that time.”
Herman said Mellen filled the air with her enthusiasm, which is scarce today. “There’s too much tempering of how people are supposed to react. She just acted spontaneously,” he said. “But it was genuine. She wasn’t a phony. You looked at her incredulously and then you joined her team, because it was the only team in the room.”
Certitude was engrained in Mellen, who said in 2012, “I am not sure that I believe in doubt, because if you’re learning and curious, something else takes over and doubt can be erased. Doubt is a negative feeling and I don’t think I am a negative person. There is no need to feel negative. It is much better to feel rosy, to look forward. That’s what I do.”
Her zeal for fashion was even hands-on during runway shows — although that tactile approach was always done with impeccable manners that were no doubt gleaned during her schoolgirl years at the prestigious Miss Porter’s School. Mellen once explained to WWD that she always asks first, before reaching out to feel the garments that runway models were wearing. A practice that sometimes elicited, “Chills!” from an approving Mellen. “I do it very quickly and I’ve never gotten a ‘No.’ I think it depends on how one does it. I do it politely.”
Mellen groomed generations of other style setters including the fashion designer Vera Wang, who at the age of 21 was Mellen’s assistant at Vogue. When Wang turned up for a sitting in a white Yves Saint Laurent shirtdress, Mellen asked where she was going “dressed like that.” The take-charge Mellen then advised Wang to go home and “put on your jeans, honey, because you’re going to be cleaning the floors.”
After working as her assistant for a year, Wang shared an office with Mellen for nearly 14 years at Vogue. “Her passion and eye for fashion were legendary, but so was her work ethic. But most of all [there was] her love for Vogue,” said Wang.
Wang described Mellen as her “mentor, taskmaster and eventual colleague.” Her fondest and worst memory of working with Mellen was at a shoot with the photographer Deborah Turbeville in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s north fountains. After Wang forgot a hat in the fashion closet, Mellen announced that she had ruined the sitting and forced her out of the Condé Nast van to go fetch the hat from the office. When it started to pour torrentially, Wang had no money or umbrella and jumped into another Condé Nast van nearby. Wang recalled Thursday, ”Luckily, my friend, photographer Patrick Demarchelier, loaned me two dollars for cab fare. There is not one time I climb the steps to The Met Costume Gala that I do not remember that moment. Polly taught me hard, but necessary lessons that are too many to mention. But failure was not an option and organization, effort, work ethic and perfectionism were paramount!”
Allure’s founding editor-in-chief Linda Wells, who is now editor of Air Mail’s beauty platform “Look,” recalled Thursday how Mellen once modeled in a Jean Paul Gaultier runway show. “She starved herself for days, and that was something because she barely ate as it was. She’d pop an Altoid and say, ‘Yum! I’m full!’ It turned out that Gaultier based this particular show on the movie ‘Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,’ so the runway zigged and zagged all over the place. If you’d laid it out flat, it would’ve been half a mile long. And as nervous as she was, Polly got up there and swanned down that runway, walking as slowly as a queen, taking in the applause. It was such a moment!”
Wells said her precision was “awe-inspiring, and always knew the exact right thing, as well as when to step back and not overdo it. All the young photographers yearned to work with her—and at the beginning, all we had were the newbies. They knew they were in the hands of a master,.” she said.
Mellen once explained how her priorities shifted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. “When Ricky Vader’s [a fashion editor] husband died [in the World Trade Center attacks], she told me, ‘Go home to Henry [Wigglesworth Mellen.]’ And I decided to do just that. I spoke to her, and I was home the next day.”
After the aforementioned “Fashion Icons” talk with Fern Mallis in 2012, Mellen said, “I was spoiled but I knew it, I know it and I loved it. I ran to work and I have no regrets.”
Mellen, whose first marriage to Louis Baker Bell ended in divorce in 1960, is survived by her daughter Leslie and son Louis Baker Bell. Predeceased by her second husband, Mellen is also survived by her stepchildren Lucinda and Henry.
Polly Mellen Fashion Editor, Mentor and Critic, Dead at 100: A Look Back [PHOTOS]
Launch Gallery: Polly Mellen Fashion Editor, Mentor and Critic, Dead at 100: A Look Back [PHOTOS]
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