Gloria Vanderbilt, the “poor little rich girl” at the center of a scandalous 1930s society custody fight who put her Gilded Age name on the backsides of blue-jeaned teenagers 40 years later, has died. She was 95.
She died Monday, according to a statement by CNN, citing her son Anderson Cooper, who hosts a news program at the cable channel.
“Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her terms,” Cooper said.
A descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a shipping and railroad magnate, she inherited about $4 million at age 21, much of which was spent by the time she was in her 40s.
Although her life was played out on a public stage from the outset, her fame spiked in the late 1970s when she teamed with apparel-maker and entrepreneur Mohan Murjani to pioneer designer jeans for women that carried her signature on the rear pockets.
She appeared in television commercials and at department stores as part of a marketing campaign that sold millions of pairs of jeans from which she earned $10 million in 1980. The humble denim pant had become a fashion phenomenon.
“That’s when I really made a lot of money,” the so-called Jeans Queen said, according to a 2014 article in the Financial Times. “The money you make yourself is the only kind of money that has any reality.”
In December 1988, the Gitano Group Inc. bought the Gloria Vanderbilt trademarks from Murjani Worldwide Ltd. for $15 million. It sold the division in 1993 to a private investor group for an undisclosed price. Gloria Vanderbilt Apparel Corp. was acquired by Jones Apparel Group Inc. in 2002 for $138 million.
Her jeans enterprise ended in acrimony. She sued her therapist and her lawyer, who had power of attorney, for bilking her out of $1.5 million of her fashion earnings between 1978 and an 1986 and selling off some of her business interests without authorization. Vanderbilt’s lawyer, Thomas Andrews, had also become her “manager, adviser, agent, promoter,” according the New York magazine story.
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