“Elegant to the point of distraction” was Oleg Cassini’s take on Jacqueline de Ribes. She was a woman whom the camera loved, with a beauty that sent people scrambling for the words to describe it.
“Vicomtesse de Ribes carries her own mark of beauty—vital fascination plus the long slender neck, high cheekbones, the slanted dark-green eyes of an early polychrome Gothic figure,” was Vogue’s assessment in 1956. The “last queen of Paris” was another epithet. Emilio Pucci nicknamed her giraffina (“baby giraffe”); Truman Capote counted her among his swans. Yet in some sense, she was more like a unicorn, the last vestige of a world of luxury and leisure, well documented in 1960s Vogue, that has long disappeared.
“I think that I’m the last survivor of so many things now,” de Ribes—who died this week at 96—said in a 2015 interview with Suzy Menkes on the occasion of a Costume Institute exhibition dedicated to her style. The show featured pieces from her archive as well as costumes she made and designs from her namesake label, which she operated from 1982 to 1995. (Five years earlier, in 2010, she was decorated as a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by then French president Nicolas Sarkozy.)
In retrospect, it seems prophetic that de Ribes should have been born on Bastille Day in 1929. The daughter of Count and Countess Jean de Beaumont, her childhood was hardly a rococo revelry. Even as she experienced war deprivations, having been sent away from home for safety, this youngster found ways to play with style, a preoccupation considered frivolous by her distant mother. She was married to Vicomte Édouard de Ribes before she turned 20.
Tall and lithe with a classical profile, de Ribes came into her fashionable self in the 1950s. “She enchants couturiers by working with them closely on fabrics and colors, then plunges them into despair by allotting only ten minutes to a fitting,” noted Vogue in a 1959 profile. Though perennially best dressed, the countess was not content to be decorative. She was an avid skier and wrote a monthly column for Marie Claire on the subject, she said, of “how to be chic on two francs,” among other activities.
De Ribes first visited New York in the early 1950s; it was also around this time that the countess started customizing the clothes in her closet and creating her own designs. One of the people she brought in to help was Valentino Garavani, who sketched for her. “The exact story is the following,” de Ribes told Menkes. “When I went on my first trip to America in 1952, I met Oleg Cassini. We discussed fashion and he liked the way I dressed. At that time I had only two or three haute couture pieces, and the other things I’d done by myself. And he said, ‘Jacqueline, could you work for me in Paris?’ I said yes and transformed part of the attic into an atelier. But I had no money to buy the fabrics, so I did the dresses in muslin. I was only 22 or 23. I didn’t know how to sketch or to make a nice drawing, and at that time I used to dress partly at Jean Dessès. I told him my story about Oleg Cassini, and he was very amused, and I said, ‘I don’t know how to draw what I create in a chic way.’ And he told me, ‘But I have an Italian illustrator who would be very happy to earn a little more money after working hours and do the drawings for you.’ And this was Valentino.”
De Ribes tended toward designs that were more austere than Garavani’s, but they communicated elegance and power rather than what we now refer to as quiet luxury. According to British Vogue, de Ribes was an inspiration for Joan Collins’s Dynasty character, Alexis Colby, though she scripted a life that was stranger and more wonderful than fiction could ever be. As Vogue put it in 1965: “The world of Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes knows no boundaries. Boundless imagination roaming everywhere. Unbounded interests luring anywhere. Moving as the mood moves her—restlessly, marvellously. As a skier racing effortlessly down the slopes of Megève. As a dancer whirling gloriously about the parties in Paris. As a teller of tales, her eyes betraying the world of fantasy and wonderment she spins for her children…”
De Ribes stirred the hearts of many in fashion, including Jean Paul Gaultier, who dedicated his spring 1999 couture collection to her loveliness. She was also a real friend to Christian Dior’s Mathilde Favrier, who wrote on Instagram: “She was more than a swan. She was beautiful, sensible, original, sincere, kind of free, generous and ultra refined…. Her last words to me two weeks ago were: ‘Protège ton coeur ma cherie.’”
