Celebrity artist and designer Gloria Vanderbilt recently died at 95. Her greatest accomplishment may have been her estimable son journalist Anderson Cooper, but the second most memorable was her patchwork interior.
About 1970 you couldn't have enough pattern.
Or maybe you could.
In fact this interior design might summarize all the proverbial excess of the 1970s.
Now, some of it was wallpaper
And some of it was antique quilts hung on the walls.
Those framed paintings are Gloria's collages.
But a lot of patchwork had to die for this look.
Apparently the floor was blocks, fragments and fabric
varnished over.
Sunbonnet Sue, ok, cut her up for upholstery
but a signed, dated Pennsylvania-German fraktur album!!!!
(My learned correspondent tells me:
"Gads... it’s a William Gross! He’s the fraktur artist that draws flower pots for the recipient’s name." )
Well, it's all about marketing. And this apartment got Gloria's name in the papers.
Gloria Vanderbilt's story is a chapter in a classic American family tale. You can talk about events such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, the abdication of King Edward VIII and the Jazz Age through family biographies.
One of Dena's Dixie Diary tops.
A few years ago we did a block of the month quilt called Dixie Diary, based on the Morgan/Vanderbilt family's Civil War story and the diary of Sarah Morgan. I concluded it with:
"Every thread of genealogy leads to impressive achievement in their real-life American saga. Cecil Morgan (Sarah's nephew Howell) tried unsuccessfully to impeach Louisiana Governor Huey Long. Howell himself and wife Thisba worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on Sioux reservations and Cecil donated their collection of Sioux arts to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. In France, Warrington (Sarah's son) was friends with authors Josef Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, as well as the Theodore Roosevelts. During World War I he worked at the American Embassy in Paris. As noted in an earlier post, Sarah's brother Philip's descendants include Thelma Furness, Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper."
Gloria's mother and her twin sister
Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt and Thelma Morgan, Lady Furness.
A recent picture of Gloria Jr.'s bedroom. Taste changes.
Read about the Morgans here: