I'm not sure if many of you have heard of Nan Kempner, but by the sounds of her obituary, she was quite a fascinating woman. Her clothing collection was recently displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I know posting an obituary may seem a bit morbid, but it is a must read. A quote from Nan herself before her passing: "I want to be buried naked, I know there's a store where I'm going."
The American socialite and couture collector Nan Kempner, who has died aged 74, was an exemplar of how to spend it if you had it; she demonstrated that entrance to the New York elite was open to those with elan and wardrobes of size two couture.
As the slogan on her cushions read, she was The Queen Of Everything. She had been a muse to Yves St Laurent, the original of Tom Wolfe's "social x-rays" (hostesses, in The Bonfire Of The Vanities, as thin as they were rich), and a reliable photo-op for 50 years, recently in demand for glossy features on fabulousness in age.
"If I'm going to go," she warned en route to hospital for treatment for the emphysema that killed her, "I'm going to do it with a photographer taking my picture."
Had she been born later, or poor, her character and wit would have furthered a career. As it was, they were her career, although now and again she swept past as consultant at Harper's Bazaar, Tiffany's, French Vogue and Christie's (where her role was to be "a shill to bring friends in"). In the Manhattan manner, she worked her networks in service of charities, especially the Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer centre, which, in 2000, received the proceeds of her book, RSVP: Menus For Entertaining From People Who Really Know How.
"Nervous hostesses ruin a party," she advised, "imagination and great friends" made for good ones, while the best hospitality might be no more than a bowl of spaghetti in Greenwich Village. Every Sunday night, she did downhome pasta for friends - Princess Diana and Nancy Reagan among them - "home" being a 16-room duplex at 79th and Park Avenue, where she lived for more than 45 years. Nan was from San Francisco, the daughter of a Ford car dealer, Albert Schlesinger, and his wife Irma, "who cared terribly about how she looked".
Her formal education ended with a year in Paris, taking painting lessons with Fernand Léger, who told her "I had so little talent I should go back to San Francisco and stop wasting my parents' money . . . it was true." Her informal education, in the power of appearances, began when Irma put her on a diet at 12; Nan read recipe books for comfort and turned to cigarettes at 14. She smoked heavily until a decade ago, tar toning her voice to a timbre that intensified the wit. On the way back from that Paris foray, she met Thomas Kempner, chairman of an investment bank, who said her Dior skirt was too short; they traded insults at the Monkey Bar, dated, and married in 1952.
Her mother and grandmother had trained her as a clotheshorse. Grandma wore "classy silk jackets to bed, with sheets to match"; mother wore only red, black or grey. When they picked her up from summer camp, she noticed they had coats with linings that matched their dresses. Her own first couture gown was a white Dior sheath, bought in the early 1950s, just before she attained instant celebrity via a Museum of Modern Art committee. She travelled to Paris and Milan twice a year for shows, seldom absent from the St Laurent salon.
Nicotine, deprivation - she used thick lettuce leaves instead of bread for sandwiches - and exercise in her apartment mini-gym kept her slender enough to fit into couture samples, discounted at $10,000 a gown.
She stored them (when the children grew up, she converted their rooms to extra closets) and "it turns out that I was an art collector. Museums come and ask me for clothes all the time". As curator of her own rails, she was elected to the fashion Hall of Fame and gave courses at the Metropolitan museum. She bought too much and wore all of it, dressed up in the 1970s as "Pocahontas, Nanook of the North, I'd be - God knows - the River Boat Queen; it was such fun".
She was crazy about, and in, high heels - she bent to kiss her husband after climbing into a pair of rare spikes, tripped and broke her hip. Such insouciant stories were a wow. Remember that 1960s legend of a socialite who was stopped at the door of a chic restaurant because she was in a trouser suit? That was Nan Kempner in a St Laurent tunic over pants. She took off the bottom half on the spot, gave it to her husband, and flaunting the top as a minidress over racehorse legs, warily sat to dine. "I put a lot of napkins in my lap and didn't dare bend over." "Artificially relaxed" was how Nan described her style.
"I've always liked being noticed, and I work hard at it . . . Never has anyone done so much with so little." She was frank about her plastic surgery. As she would go "to the opening of a door", there were decades of lunches, galas and parties worldwide, her favourite being her 50th wedding anniversary, catering for 476 people at the New York Botanical Gardens. Although by then accessorised with a portable oxygen tank, she attended Ronald Reagan's funeral, and dished the dirt on it with the rest of the girls next day. Two women in an Armistead Maupin story propose a wax museum of society so that future generations will know what Nan Kempner was like. No need. She left enough snaps of herself looking swell to paper Park Avenue.
Her husband, and children Tommy, Lina and James, survive her. · Nan Kempner, couture collector, born July 24 1930; died July 3 2005
