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Gloria Vanderbilt, American jeans queen, dies at 95

NEW YORK: Gloria Vanderbilt , the intrepid heiress, artist and romantic who began her extraordinary life as the "poor little rich girl" of the Great Depression , survived family tragedy and multiple marriages and reigned during the 1970s and 1980s as a designer jeans pioneer, died on Monday at the age of 95.


Vanderbilt was the great-great-granddaughter of financier Corelius Vanderbilt and the mother of CNN newsman Anderson Cooper. Cooper said Vanderbilt died at home with friends and family at her side. She had been suffering from advanced stomach cancer , he noted. "Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms. "She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend."

Her life was chronicled in sensational headlines from her childhood through four marriages and three divorces. She married for the first time at 17, causing her aunt to disinherit her. Her husbands included Leopold Stokowski, the celebrated conductor, and Sidney Lumet, the award-winning movie and television director. In 1988, she witnessed the suicide of one of her four sons.

Vanderbilt was a talented painter and collagist who also acted on the stage and TV. She was a fabric designer who became an early enthusiast for designer denim. The dark-haired, tall and ultra-thin Vanderbilt partnered with Mohan Murjani, who introduced a $1 million advertising campaign in 1978 that turned the Gloria Vanderbilt brand with its signature white swan label into a sensation. At its peak in 1980, it was generating over $200 million in sales. And decades later, famous-name designer jeans - dressed up or down - remain a woman's wardrobe staple.

Vanderbilt was born in 1924, a century after her great-great-grandfather started the family fortune, first in steamships, later in railroads. He left around $100 million when he died in 1877 at age 82. Beneficiary of a $5 million trust fund after her father Reginald Claypoole died, Vanderbilt became the "poor little rich girl" in 1934 at age 10 as the object of a custody fight between her globe-trotting mother and matriarchal aunt. The aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 59, who controlled $78 million, won custody of her niece.

The "poor little rich girl" nickname "bothered me enormously", Vanderbilt said in 2016. "It really did influence me to make something of my life."

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