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.

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.

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.