The World of Gloria Vanderbilt

The World of Gloria Vanderbilt is a pictorial biography of the charismatic heiress who first captured America’s heart at the tender age of ten, when she became the subject of a scandalous custody trial. A true style-maker, Vanderbilt’s story comes to life through the eyes of some of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century. Since her much-heralded birth in 1924, Gloria Vanderbilt has been many things: an heiress, a painter, a decorator, a muse, a designer, a model, a writer, an entrepreneur, a socialite, an icon-but most of all, a survivor. She brought the Vanderbilt name out of the Gilded Age and into the Digital Age, reinventing herself over and over along the way. Hers is a story of charisma, glamour, and heartbreaking loss, told here through photographs, drawings, and paintings, including many from Gloria’s own archive. The photographers whose portraits of her appear in this volume include Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Cecil Beaton, Inge Morath, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, Gordon Parks, Francesco Scavullo, Jack Robinson, Gianni Penati, Toni Frissel, Milton Greene, Kenneth Paul Block, and George Hoyningen-Huene; some of the photographs, taken from Vanderbilt’s personal albums, have never been published before.