Eleanor Lambert: The Seventh Avenue Empress Who Created The Met Gala

I have said this before and I will say it again: World War Two changed the global fashion industry forever. Between June 14, 1940 and August 26, 1944, Paris was occupied by German forces, and with the wartime restrictions imposed by the Vichy Government and production restrictions and requirements of the Nazis, the globe was effectively cut-off from French haute couture. There were myriad effects, but the most immediately consequential was the development of more localized fashion centers, scattered around the world. In the United States, the world of fashion was becoming the purview of its first fashion publicist, Eleanor Lambert. Her work would usher in a new era of American fashion, which included the creation of the Metropolitan Museum’s Gala.

In 1937, New York’s Museum of Costume Art first opened its doors, thanks to philanthropist Irene Lewisohn. Eventually the museum would become the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, but it was not affiliated with the Metropolitan Museum until 1946, when the two institutions merged. Funding is always needed by museums, and Eleanor Lambert focused on finding it, drumming up interest in the new project within the fashion community. The formation of the new Costume Institute was the perfect occasion to raise funds, and so Lambert organized a benefit at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, held on December 1, 1948.

The first event held to support the new museum was a midnight supper, a type of party either invented or popularized by Mrs. Caroline Astor in the 19th century. Lambert’s was attended by a select group of carefully selected donors and potential donors, and was described as an “intimate soiree designed to raise money for the newly launched Costume Institute at the newly launched Metropolitan Museum of Art,” there were no celebrities in attendance, no big fancy names or a red carpet. Tickets to the first gala were $50, or, with inflation, about $659 in 2024. Over the next couple of decades, Lambert’s fundraiser became known as The Party Of The Year, held in Central Park or the Plaza’s Rainbow Room or back at the Waldorf Astoria.

The fundraiser for the Costume Institute would not be officially called a “Gala” until 1971, when Diana Vreeland, recently forced out of American Vogue, joined the museum as a Special Consultant and moved the event to the first Monday in May. Vreeland is also responsible for the organized themed exhibitions (with corresponding parties) to entice money and attention to one of the most important museum costume collections in the United States. Immediately the Gala became an important event on Manhattan’s busy philanthropic calendar.

Eleanor Lambert is one of the most important and influential figures in the history of American fashion, though she never designed a garment. Without hyperbole, Lambert’s efforts are directly linked to New York’s evolution from American Fashion Center to achieving its current status as an arbiter of global style. New York Fashion Week, national fashion awards ceremonies, even the Best Dressed List, these bastions of the modern fashion business were all the work of Lambert and her enduring legacy is the success of the American designer on the world stage today.

Lambert was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1903, and was interested in the arts from childhood. After attending the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis and the Chicago Art Institute, she moved to New York City in 1925 where she began her career designing book covers at Franklin Spear. She began to work as a publicist early on in her career, at first for artists, a client list which grew to include Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock. Lambert assisted in the founding of the New York Museum of Modern Art, and worked with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney when she was creating the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931.

In the early 1930s much of what was sold as American fashion were “interpretations,” distillations of designs that came from Paris, or outright copies, licensed and otherwise. There was very little name recognition for American designers, outside of Hollywood, even at home in the United States. Some notable exceptions to this would be the work of Hattie Carnegie, Elizabeth Hawes, Nettie Rosenstein, and Valentina, all American designers who created work which was absolutely their own, independent of Paris or anywhere else. According to Lambert’s biographer John Tiffany, Lambert took on her first fashion designer client, Annette Simpson, in 1932. Soon she was representing Mollie Parnis as well. In 1939, presciently recognizing the need to protect the interests of the American designer in the turbulent wartime years, Lambert founded the New York Dress Institute, where she served as director until 1962.

Lambert, always taking on more clients, utilized the turbulent years of the Second World War to raise awareness about the good, interesting work the American designer was creating. By 1941, Lambert had convinced the New York Dress Institute to partner with the American makeup and cosmetics brand Coty on the first-ever American Fashion Critics Awards, and to lend its name to the actual award.

With a system in place to reward the American designer for their innovations, Lambert next turned her attention to organizing the New York City fashion scene. For years designers, manufacturers, and the various other parties involved in fashion had been competing for attention, locations and press for each season’s shows. Without a neutral third party organizing there was no set calendar of events or structure imposed on the many collections being shown over an undetermined period of time. Lambert offered to figure it out, and became the producer for the first ever Fashion Press Week, held in New York in 1943. From abject chaos soon an organized event emerged, as Lambert coordinated and marshaled the press, department store buyers and brands into a dizzying array of collections. It was immediately clear that the plan had been a major success and it soon became a popular biannual event, becoming what we now call New York Fashion Week.

The Best Dressed list was originally a Paris creation. Before the outbreak of WWII, haute couture Maison's had loosely organized the names as a way to ingratiate, flatter or celebrate their favorite clients and patrons. Once Paris was occupied, this mattered little as the haute couture client was disappearing from Paris and the ateliers were struggling to produce what they could to the few who remained. Sensing an opportunity left by another void left by Paris, around 1940 Lambert borrowed the idea, tweaking the concept to meet the needs of the American designer and client. At first, Lambert’s list was used to promote specifically American design and style. Lambert’s ever growing stable of designer clients, and her innumerable industry contacts, allowed the publicist to use her considerable quantity of influence to next look outside of her country and begin promoting the “American Look,” a program which launched in 1945 with an eye on elevating the perception of American aesthetics and sensibilities abroad.

The New York Dress Institute dissolved in 1962, twenty years after it had been founded, and Lambert founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) to replace it. The CFDA was created to fix relations between American designers, who sometimes resorted to feuds or nasty tactics instead of presenting a united front as an industry. By creating the organizing body, Lambert ensured that all opinions could be heard, and that decisions addressing them could be made when faced with issues which affected the entire industry. It also helped to get everyone on the same event calendar, and not competing against each other for press attention or to get bodies into seats at fashion shows. Overtime, the designers themselves took control of the council, and by the 1970s Eleanor Lambert was free to put her energy into the causes which needed her the most.

Always on the lookout for emerging talent, Lambert noticed Oscar de la Renta early in his career. Though he could not afford a publicist, let alone the most influential publicity maven in New York City, she took him on as a client without charging for her services. Once his career had taken off, even after his brand had created its own in-house department, de la Renta continued to send Lambert checks for back pay, thanking her for the faith she’d had in him before he’d made it big. In 2002, suffering from macular degeneration which left her partially blind, Lambert was still finding the time and energy to meet regularly with Rick Owens, mentoring him as his career began to take off internationally.

Lambert never really retired; though she did give up her office after her 99 birthday. She kept a few of her favorite clients though. When Lambert died at her Manhattan home, on October 7, 2003, she was 100 years old. Looking back over her incredible career Lambert said, “I am proud that I helped bring American style to the world’s attention and it is now considered an independent entity in the history of fashion.”