One of the most memorable models of the late 1960s and 1970s, Pat Evans was born and raised in Harlem. After she shaved her head, her modeling career became highly successful with Pat starring in ad campaigns, editorials and on the cover of three legendary Ohio Players albums. Unwilling to put up with the way Black women were treated as models, she moved into designing – creating handmade leather clothes that were worn by superstars like Isaac Hayes. Pat also worked as a makeup artist for yet more superstars, Aretha Franklin among them, before founding her own modeling agency. A religious experience led her to close her agency and move to the country in the early 1990s, focusing since then on her spiritual experience and on making traditional Native American clothes, moccasins, and objects. She lives a quiet life away from fashion industry but kindly took the time to reminisce and share her experiences with us.

Joan Quinn has been a major force in the Los Angeles art scene for 70 years, as a collector, promoter, advocate, and friend to generations of artists. While amassing a large “accumulation” of art, her passion and collecting zeal also made her a muse for artists—what started as some artist friends painting and sculpting her portrait in the seventies, has now grown into a collection of over 300 portraits of Joan. In the late 1970s, Andy Warhol asked her to become West Coast editor of Interview magazine; a role she later held with several other publications. From the mid-1980s until 2020, Joan hosted public access TV shows where she interviewed artists and creatives.

Known for his saturated, highly glamorous covers for Interview magazine, Richard Bernstein was born in New York in 1939; he passed away from AIDs-related complications in 2002. Richard created the cover for every Interview magazine up until Warhol's death in 1987—a prodigious volume of work that serves as an archive of 1970s and 1980s celebrity culture. In the late 1970s, Richard Bernstein became friends with Grace Jones, helping to mold her visual identity as she first emerged as a singer. The duo continued to work together for many years. Richard was also an early innovator in digital art.

Rory is Richard's nephew and the one entrusted with maintaining and carrying forward his legacy. In our conversation, he provides a short biography of Richard, his artistic career and his relationship with Andy Warhol. We then speak about what is like to run an artist’s estate, what it entails, and the process of archiving. Rory was instrumental in the creation of a coffee table book on Richard, Starmaker, which was published by Rizzoli in 2018; he has also loaned Richard’s work to numerous museum exhibitions and collaborated with a number of fashion and interiors brands.

Edina Ronay is a fashion designer, actress and model. Born in Budapest to a family of successful restaurateurs, Edina fled to London with her parents after the war. There her father opened a restaurant and then founded what became a very successful and influential series of guidebooks, starting with Egon Ronay's Guide to British Eateries in 1957. As a teen Edina became an actress, appearing in a number of cult British films. She was a key member of the hip London scene and dated Michael Caine before she met her husband, photographer Dick Polak. With him, she lived in Morocco and Formentera, until they returned to London to act, model and have children. In the early 1970s, Edina began selling vintage clothes. When she discovered a cache of 30s and 40s vintage knitting patterns in 1978, a new business was born. Highly successful from the start, Edina & Lena sold their hand knits in stores all over the world. In the 1980s Edina took over full control of the company—renamed Edina Ronay, it expanded into dresses and separates.

Susan Wood is a New Yorker born and bred. She started her career in the early 1950s, working in the lab at LIFE magazine before having her first photo published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1955. Over the subsequent decades, Susan photographed for everyone and truly across all genres. Fashion, interiors, portraits, food, travel, crafts, documentary, and movie stills—Susan did it all at a time when there were very few female photographers in the industry. Among the magazines she worked for were Vogue, New York Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, Mademoiselle, People, LOOK, Good Housekeeping, and Glamour. We discuss her 60 year career, what it was like working as a female photographer at that time, her creative process, the many famous people she has photographed and much more.

Shirley Lord is a journalist, beauty editor and expert, and novelist, who rose from working-class Cockney lass to one of the most influential people in the beauty industry through grit, good humor, and a passion for journalism. A features editor for a British women’s magazine by age 24, three years later she married the carpet tycoon Cyril Lord. Weaving easily between high-class entertaining and a high-powered career, Shirley worked for British Harper’s Bazaar and the Evening Standard in London before leaving her marriage in the early 1970s to move to New York. After a stint as beauty director of Harper’s Bazaar, she became beauty editor of Vogue—a job that she would have in some capacity for most of the next 40 years, only leaving briefly to be vice president of Helena Rubinstein. In the 1980s she married Abe Rosenthal, the legendary editor of the New York Times—they were together until his death in 2011. Shirley Lord has written two beauty books as well as several novels drawing on her deep knowledge of the glamorous fashion and beauty industries.

This week on Sighs & Whispers, fashion and cultural historian Laura McLaws Helms meets with fashion designer, actress, writer and all-around creative Tere Tereba. As a teenager Tereba began designing for Arpeja, the largest LA-based multi-brand fashion company who owned Young Edwardian, Young Innocent and many others. Quickly making a name for herself, over the next twenty years Tereba designed for all of the major Los Angeles fashion companies (including Malibu Media and Jody T.), before starting her own eponymous high-end line in the late 1980s. Alongside her high-powered fashion design career, Tere maintained a very busy social life among the upper echelons of the film and art worlds—good friends with the likes of Andy Warhol, she also spent a lot of time in Paris and Rome in the 1970s with the crème de la crème of the European movie world. After many years of friendship she acted in Andy Warhol’s Bad in 1977. After ten years of research, her book on a notorious gangster (Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.'s Notorious Mobster) was published in 2012.

An artist, teacher, creative visionary, Barbara Nessim is a completely inspiring soul. A highly successful commercial artist for several decades, Barbara was one of very few full-time professional women illustrators working in the United States during the 1960s. In the 1980s Barbara became an early pioneer in computer art—one of the few classically trained artists at the time who saw the value in wedding fine art with computer technology.

I had the opportunity to chat with famed photographer Robert Farber in his Upper East Side studio. Rising to prominence as a nude and fashion photographer in the mid-to-late 1970s, by the late 1980s posters of his photos were everywhere and are a defining memory of that time. Robert developed his signature soft focus aesthetic in the early 1970s by experimenting with different films, filters and development processes with the goal of creating a painterly effect on film. A must listen if you interested in photography, Robert opens up about the many aspects of his career as well as the sometime difficulties of balancing this hectic lifestyle with a family.

A makeup artist, hairstylist, interior decorator and now the owner/curator of a gallery, Francis Rick Gillette’s life has always revolved around the pursuit and creation of beauty—he’s followed this muse through immense career highs and lows. In great detail, Rick vividly brings to life the many worlds of New York at that time—from downtown hip salons to luxury fashion magazines to the gay scene. For anyone interested in fashion, this is the interview to listen to. Rick relays his memories of all the greats—Avedon, Mellon, Penn, Newton, Hutton, Scavullo.

When I was in London in May I spent the afternoon with photographer and commercial director Willie Christie. A wonderfully gossipy conversation, Willie discusses his career from photo assistant to photographer to commercial director to screenwriter to today. Full of interesting stories and memories about his time as a fashion photographer in the 1970s when he was married to Grace Coddington and shooting primarily for British Vogue, Willie then went on to direct videos for Pink Floyd and have a highly successful commercial directing career that spanned decades.

While in London I met with legendary make-up artist Barbara Daly. Barbara’s long and illustrious career includes working with such photographic greats as Helmut Newton, Barry Lategan and Norman Parkinson, in addition to designing the makeup looks for two of Stanley Kubrick’s films, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Barry Lyndon.’ She then went on to found her own beauty school and launch two cosmetics brands, but her most famous work was doing Princess Diana’s make-up on her wedding day in 1981.

Now 96, Tony Vaccaro is a legend in the photography world. Drafted into WWII at age 20, he brought his 35 mm camera with him to the frontlines in Europe—vividly capturing all aspects of an infantryman’s life: the chaos, the boredom, the destruction, the death. Tony stayed on in Europe after the war, documenting the reconstruction, before returning to New York where he established himself as a very in-demand fashion and celebrity photographer for Life and Look magazines. To all of his work he brought a love of symmetry and a deep humanity.

In the last episode in this season, I sat down with acclaimed fashion journalist Marylou Luther to discuss her long and continuing career. Marylou has been writing about fashion since the early 1950s yet even after seven decades still retails so much passion and engagement with it. Over the years she has written for the Des Moines Register, the Chicago Tribune, McCall’s Sportswear, the LA Times, and since the mid-1980s she has devoted most of her time to the Fashion Group International, of which she is the creative director. Every season she attends the shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris, and then puts together an audio-visual presentation that tracks the trends and which is shown to all members of the FGI.

For this episode I sat down with Ingrid Boulting, best known as the ‘Biba girl’ of early ‘70s fashion and Robert DeNiro’s paramour in The Last Tycoon (1976). A ballerina, a model, an actress, a mother, a yoga teacher, a business owner, a painter, an animal lover, a trauma survivor—Ingrid truly exemplifies the type of person I have sought to talk with in this series—someone who molds and creates the life they desire in the face of ups and downs and veers off the path.

This conversation is with fashion designer Anna Sui, who founded her company in 1980. Known for affordable clothes, Sui has created an “Anna Sui world” that is completely identifiable all over the world—from the red floors, purple walls and lacquered black furniture in her boutiques, to the ornate carved packaging on her eye shadows, Sui never stopped herself from fully following her passions. In this interview Anna provides an interesting insight into the inspiration, research, hard work and business behind fashion success.

This conversation is with renowned photographer and film director, Jerry Schatzberg, who at 90 years old is still creating and working hard. We discussed his path from the Bronx to Vogue fashion photographer, to celebrity photographer and nightclub owner, to acclaimed director.

For this episode I chatted with fashion designer Vicky Tiel, who truly exemplifies an ardor for life. Vicky Tiel started designing clothes as a pre-teen before studying fashion at Parsons in New York. Alongside her college friend, Mia Fonssagrives, she moved to Paris at age 20 in 1964, where they quickly became the toast of the town. Snapped up to be costume designers on the film ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, they met Elizabeth Taylor at the studio—she became a client, friend and investor in their company. Tiel married Elizabeth Taylor’s makeup man and spent several years traveling the world with the Burtons. She went on help establish the couture salon at Bergdorf Goodman in 1981. For the last few years, Tiel has focused on her perfume lines, which she primarily sells on HSN. Full of enthusiasm, Vicky is a delight—she’s an intriguing mix of a keen businesswoman, a hopeless romantic and a great girlfriend that you want to dish all your troubles to.

For the second episode I sat down with Norma Kamali. A fashion designer with a career spanning fifty years, she is the perfect example of someone who has molded a life of intention and beauty.