Editor of American Vogue for 17 years who democratised fashion and promoted wearable US clothes
Grace Mirabella’s 17 years as editor of American Vogue, the core publication of Condé Nast’s magazine empire at its most expansive, are usually evaluated as a successful business intervention. She took the magazine from a circulation falling towards 400,000 in 1971 to rising above a million and half in 1988. Fleeing advertisers returned with such big budgets that her hefty September issues required the US Post Office to make special delivery arrangements.
But Mirabella’s lasting value to fashion was her belief that the US had its own style of glamour, and that its major creators deserved international acclaim for what a Mirabella favourite, Bill Blass, called “a certain nonchalance”.