Polly Mellen, who has died aged 100, was a leading creative force and fashion editor at Vogue, responsible for bringing the magazine’s famously outlandish photoshoots to life.
As The Telegraph reports, Mellen got her first foray into the fashion world with Richard Avedon in the 1950s, where she helped to shape the look of his shoots with the likes of Sophia Loren and Rudolf Nureyev. She also worked with up-and-coming talent such as Lauren Hutton and Penelope Tree.
In 1964 she arrived at Vogue under the leadership of the legendary Diana Vreeland, and set about reinventing what she regarded as the sedate, stiff look of the fashion spreads. Over the next three decades she helped to create some of the most memorable imagery to feature in the magazine, bringing a playful daring and an element of extravagance to outfits designed for the liberated modern woman.
One of five children, she was born Polly Allen in West Hartford, Connecticut, on June 18 1924. The family was well-off and both parents dressed with flair: her father had his suits made by a tailor at Saks Fifth Avenue, while her mother lived in elegantly printed pyjamas – except on trips to Paris or Rome or New York, when she would wear black or navy.
Polly harbored ambitions to work in fashion from a young age and loved dressing her dolls up in outfits made by her mother. She graduated from Miss Porter’s School for Girls and went to work as a nurse’s aide in Virginia Hospital towards the end of the Second World War. In 1949 she moved to New York and got a job working in the department store Lord & Taylor.
She left to become fashion editor at the magazine Mademoiselle, where a friend helped her to secure an audience with the formidable Diana Vreeland, then fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar.
“I was absolutely terrified,” Polly Mellen recalled, “[but] I think she recognised the passion and the energy I had.” Her first assignment was to stage a portrait of Audrey Hepburn – then a promising young actress – under the direction of Richard Avedon. She stayed in the job for another two years.
Her departure from the magazine came when she got married, and in 1952 she moved to Philadelphia. After eight years the marriage broke down, and Diana Vreeland lured her back to Harper’s Bazaar.
She was put to work with Richard Avedon, sourcing clothes for models such as Suzy Parker. The job gave her more influence than she had previously had, and she was no longer afraid to express her opinions – once turning a dress that she particularly disliked inside-out before a shoot. The incident almost cost her the job, but Diana Vreeland stood by her. “It was all or nothing with Mrs Vreeland”, Polly Mellen later recalled. “When she had a conviction, she never left your side.”
When Diana Vreeland departed for Vogue she took Avedon with her; by this time he and Polly Mellen were close friends, and it was not long before she joined him. Her first project for the magazine took her to Japan, where she fell in love with Japanese culture – particularly the gardens – during a five-week shoot with the supermodel Verushka. At the time it was Condé Nast’s most expensive ever shoot.
An early first marriage was dissolved, and in 1965 she married Henry Wigglesworth Mellen, who died in 2014. She had two children from her first marriage. Later in her career she worked with Deborah Turbeville on her 1975 “Bath House” swimwear spread – whose aesthetic was compared, to her horror, to that of a prison camp – and with Helmut Newton on “The Story of Ohh”, a highly suggestive series of tableaux featuring a 24-year-old Lisa Taylor.
As time passed and photographers became more daring she was able to coax her subjects into more unusual and creative shoots – memorably convincing Nastassja Kinski to pose naked for Richard Avedon with a large snake wound round her body. Ever the perfectionist, Polly Mellen later remarked that her one regret was putting a bracelet – the only adornment apart from the snake – on her subject’s arm.
From 1991 to 1999 she was creative director at Allure, having left American Vogue behind after Anna Wintour brought in Grace Coddington as a second creative director. She brought with her a well-established reputation as a demanding boss – one who rarely held on to an assistant for more than two years and subsisted mostly on Evian water during the working day.
Moving at a ferocious pace – others were upbraided for failing to keep up – she insisted on vetting designers herself, immersing herself in fashion’s ceaseless quest for the next bright young talent. “I look for changes, for androgyny, for femininity,” she said. “for a new cut, pant, skirt, sensitivity.”
Although formally retired from Condé Nast in 2001, she remained closely connected to the fashion scene, both as a paid consultant and as an informal observer. In 1993 Polly Mellen received a Lifetime Achievement award from the The Council of Fashion Designers of America.
—
Photo Credit: Yulia Reznikov / Shutterstock.com