Grace Mirabella, former Vogue editor, dies at 92 |

Grace Mirabella, who was the most influential voice in fashion during her 17 years as the top editor of Vogue magazine, reshaping the publication toward simplicity and practicality before later launching a rival magazine called Mirabella, died Dec. 23 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.

The death was confirmed by a stepson, Anthony Cahan, who said there was no specific medical cause.

Ms. Mirabella began working at Vogue in the early 1950s, when the magazine was effectively the leading fashion arbiter in the country. She later described it as a place “with wonderful-looking editors who strolled like peacocks through the halls.”

In 1963, the temperamental, flamboyant Diana Vreeland was named the magazine’s editor in chief, and Ms. Mirabella became one of her top assistants. Vreeland made Vogue a showcase for elite, mostly European designers and jet-setting readers, featuring clothing — such as a bikini made of gold chains — seldom seen anywhere but on a fashion runway.

The magazine had an enormous presence in the fashion world, chronicling and starting trends in style, but as its circulation and advertising began to shrink, Vreeland was abruptly fired in 1971. The corporate managers of the Condé Nast magazine group installed Ms. Mirabella in her place.

“It was very difficult to work for her,” Ms. Mirabella told The Washington Post in 1988. “But you can get along with someone who is difficult if you admire them.”

At a time when the women’s movement was gaining momentum, Ms. Mirabella brought an entirely different sensibility to the magazine.

“I wanted to give Vogue back to real women,” she said.

In one of her first moves, Ms. Mirabella had the red walls of Vreeland’s office repainted in shades of beige — her favorite color. She jettisoned Elizabeth Taylor and Cher from the cover of Vogue in favor of models such as Lauren Hutton, Patti Hansen and Lisa Taylor, who wore little makeup and had natural, unfussy hairstyles. Hutton’s gaptoothed smile replaced the closemouthed gaze and white eyeliner of Vogue models of the 1960s.

“It was make-believe, the wilder shores of love,” Ms. Mirabella said of the magazine she inherited from Vreeland. “I was a great fan of hers, and I followed her around like a bird dog. But when I took over, that wasn’t wanted anymore.”

Ms. Mirabella occupied a front-row seat at the fashion shows in Paris and New York, but her sense of couture leaned more toward outfits that women could wear at work or at parties. She had little interest in passing trends.

Rather than looking to Europe for fashion cues, she preferred the straightforward approach of American designers such as Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan.

“Fashion to me isn’t, and never has been, an end in and of itself,” Ms. Mirabella said in 1995. “You’ll never find me getting excited about shoulder pads or caring deeply, one way or the other, if hemlines went up or down.”

As editor of Vogue, she banned the use of cigarettes in fashion photographs, although cigarette advertisements still appeared in the pages of the magazine. She also introduced more coverage of the arts, health and social issues.

“She’s a very practical woman in her point of view, and she thinks of women in their clothes and how they’re wearing them,” Beene once said of Ms. Mirabella. “She’s been sort of a martyr for modern women.”

During her years as editor, Vogue was thick with advertising, and the magazine’s circulation rose from 400,000 in 1971 to 1.25 million in 1988. But in June of that year, Ms. Mirabella was pushed out of the editor’s chair as unceremoniously as Vreeland had been years before.

Ms. Mirabella learned of her firing only after the news had been announced on television by gossip columnist Liz Smith. Her bosses at Condé Nast, owner S.I. Newhouse Jr. and creative director Alexander Liberman, hadn’t bothered to tell the 59-year-old Ms. Mirabella that she was being ousted in favor of 38-year-old Anna Wintour.

Newhouse said it was time to “reposition Vogue for the ’90s,” as new magazines such as Elle began to gain wide readership. Ms. Mirabella accepted her change with dignity, saying only that her dismissal was “very unstylish, for such a stylish place.”

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She later explained that Condé Nast had imposed a change in editorial direction at Vogue that made her “eager to get out of there, but I didn’t have the guts to quit.”

Soon afterward, she met media mogul Rupert Murdoch for lunch. He put up the money to launch a new magazine with Ms. Mirabella not just at the helm, but with her name on the cover.

Mirabella magazine debuted in 1989, designed to fill a niche for somewhat older women who were interested in more than fashion. Sometimes described as an Esquire for women, it balanced articles about fashion with stories on filmmakers, politics, social issues, psychology and travel.

“We won’t do spreads of strapless dresses or articles about how you’ll love black dresses,” Ms. Mirabella said. Instead of following the latest trend, she urged women to develop a personal style that would encompass not just dress, but also the arts and a wider view of life.

She invoked an unlikely model to depart from the “isn’t-that-divine” school of fashion writing. Her goal was to “make conversation about fashion as interesting as conversation about baseball.”

“There’s a directness, a straightness, nothing layered or falsified in good talk about baseball,” she told Barron’s in 1989. “It has a beat. It’s straight reporting, not syrupy stuff.”

At first, Mirabella was a big success. It won awards, and its circulation reached 625,000. But it failed to earn a profit, and in 1995, Murdoch sold the publication to the Hachette magazine group. By then, Ms. Mirabella had largely stepped away from the publication, leaving only her name on the cover. The magazine folded in 2000.

Marie Grace Mirabella was born June 10, 1929, in Newark and grew up in Maplewood, N.J., as an only child. Her father was an importer of wine and liquor whose gambling left his wife and daughter in debt after he died in the 1940s.

Ms. Mirabella’s Italian-born mother emphasized to her daughter the need to be financially independent, and Grace was working by the time she was 16.

At Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Ms. Mirabella edited the school newspaper and majored in economics. She graduated in 1950, then worked briefly at department stores before joining Vogue in a low-level job, verifying photo captions. She spent two years working for fashion houses in Italy before returning to Vogue in the mid-1950s.

Ms. Mirabella was married in 1974 to surgeon William Cahan, who was a leading antismoking crusader. He offered her $1,000 if she could give up her two-pack-a-day habit for a year. She collected on the bet and later commissioned a story in Mirabella on how cigarette companies targeted women.

Her husband died in 2001. Survivors include two stepsons, Dr. Anthony Cahan of Pound Ridge, N.Y., and Christopher Cahan of Pacific Palisades, Calif.; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

In later years, Ms. Mirabella lectured, wrote a book about the Tiffany & Co. jewelry company and contributed to magazines and online outlets. She was an advocate for educational opportunities for children.

Ms. Mirabella’s 1995 memoir, “In and Out of Vogue,” settled a few scores with her old crowd at Condé Nast, singling out Newhouse’s “dull gaze” and describing Wintour, her successor as Vogue editor, as “not anybody I have long conversations with.”

In the book, Ms. Mirabella outlined her approach to fashion aesthetics and to life.

“What I’ve always cared about, passionately, is style,” she wrote. “Style is how a woman carries herself and approaches the world. It’s about how she wears her clothes and it’s more: an attitude about living.”

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Grace Mirabella, former Vogue editor, dies at 92

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