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Fashion icon and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt dies aged 95

US fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt – the intrepid heiress, artist and romantic who began her extraordinary life as the "poor little rich girl" of the Great Depression – has died at the age of 95.

She survived family tragedy, multiple marriages, and reigned during the 1970s and 80s as a designer jeans pioneer.

Ms Vanderbilt was the great-great-granddaughter of financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and the mother of CNN newsman Anderson Cooper, who announced her death via a first-person obituary that aired on the network on Monday morning.

Cooper said Ms Vanderbilt died at home with friends and family at her side.

She had been suffering from advanced stomach cancer, he noted.

New York socialite Gloria Vanderbilt is photographed with her son, Andersen Cooper.
Gloria Vanderbilt pictured with her son, Anderson Cooper. Source: AP

"Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms," Cooper said in a statement.

"She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend. She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her, and they'd tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest, and most modern."

Her life was chronicled in sensational headlines from her childhood through four marriages and three divorces.

She married for the first time at 17, causing her aunt to disinherit her.

Her husbands included celebrated conductor Leopold Stokowski and Sidney Lumet, the award-winning movie and television director.

In 1988, she witnessed the suicide of one of her four sons.

Tributes for ‘incredible woman’

Tributes online came from celebrities and fans of her clothes alike.

Alyssa Milano called her "an incredible woman" and US actress Dana Delany said she treasures one of Vanderbilt's paintings.

Model Carol Alt hailed her as a "fashion icon and innovator”.

And one Twitter user mourned by remembering the canary Vanderbilt jeans she wore in junior high school.

Ms Vanderbilt was a talented painter and collagist who also acted on the stage, appearing on Broadway’s The Time of Your Life in 1955, and television – Playhouse 90, Studio One, Kraft Theater and US Steel Hour.

She was a fabric designer who became an early enthusiast for designer denim.

The dark-haired, tall and ultra-thin Ms Vanderbilt partnered with Mohan Murjani, who introduced a US$1 million (almost AU$1.5 million) advertising campaign in 1978 that turned the Gloria Vanderbilt brand with its signature white swan label into a sensation.

At its peak in 1980, it was generating more than US$200 million (about AU$292 million) in sales. And decades later, famous-name designer jeans — dressed up or down — remain a woman's wardrobe staple.

Gloria Vanderbilt is pictured here with fashion designers Halston, Bob Mackie and Geoffrey Beene in 1981.
Fashion designers Halston, Bob Mackie, Gloria Vanderbilt and Geoffrey Beene (left to right) pose on the set of the Love Boat at Warner Brothers Studio in Los Angeles in 1981. Source: AP

Ms Vanderbilt wrote several books, including the 2004 chronicle of her love life, It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir.

It drops such names as Errol Flynn whom she dated as a teenager, Frank Sinatra for whom she left Stokowski, Marlon Brando and Howard Hughes.

She claimed her only happy marriage was to author Wyatt Cooper, which ended with his death in 1978 at age 50.

Cooper called her memoir "a terrific book; it's like an older 'Sex and the City’."

"I've had many, many loves," Ms Vanderbilt told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview.

"I always feel that something wonderful is going to happen. And it always does."

Noting her father's death when she was a toddler, she said: "If you don't have a father, you don't miss it, because you don't know what it is. It was really only when I married Wyatt Cooper that I understood what it was like to have a father, because he was just an extraordinary father."

In 2016, Ms Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper appeared together in the HBO documentary "Nothing Left Unsaid."

Gloria Vanderbilt in a black and white photo from 1964.
Gloria Vanderbilt poses for a photo in 1964.Source: AP

‘Poor little rich girl’

Gloria Laura Madeleine Sophie Vanderbilt was born in 1924, a century after her great-great-grandfather started the family fortune, first in steamships, later in railroads. He left around $100 million when he died in 1877 at age 82.

Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was 43, a gambler and boozer dying of liver disease when he married Gloria Morgan, 19, in 1923. Their daughter was 1 when Vanderbilt died in 1925, having gone through $25 million in 14 years.

Beneficiary of a US$5 million (about AU$7.3 million) trust fund, Ms Vanderbilt became the "poor little rich girl" in 1934 at age 10 as the object of a custody fight between her globe-trotting mother and matriarchal aunt.

The aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 59, who controlled $78 million and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, won custody of her niece.

A shocked judge had closed the trial when a maid accused the child's mother of a lesbian affair with a member of the British royal family. The fight was chronicled in the best-selling 1980 book "Little Gloria ... Happy at Last" made into a TV miniseries in 1982 with Angela Lansbury playing Whitney.

The "poor little rich girl" nickname "bothered me enormously", Ms Vanderbilt told The Associated Press in a 2016 interview .

"I didn't see any of the press — the newspapers were kept from me. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't feel poor and I didn't feel rich. It really did influence me enormously to make something of my life when I realised what it meant."

After spending the next seven years on her aunt's Long Island estate, Ms Vanderbilt went to Hollywood. She dated celebrities and declared she would marry Hughes. Instead, the 17-year-old wed Hughes' press agent, Pasquale di Cicco, prompting her aunt to cut Gloria out of her will.

Custody battle for her sons

Ms Vanderbilt came into her own trust fund in 1945 at age 21. She also divorced di Cicco, whom she said had beaten her often, and the next day married the 63-year-old Stokowski. The marriage to the conductor lasted 10 years and produced two sons, Stanislaus and Christopher.

After her marriage broke up, Ms Vanderbilt found herself embroiled in another custody case, this time as the mother.

During the closed hearings, Stokowski accused Ms Vanderbilt of spending too much time at parties and too little with the boys.

She accused him of tyrannising his sons and said he really was 85, and not 72 as he claimed.

Socialite and artist Gloria Vanderbilt in 2009. Source: Getty
Ms Vanderbilt, who had been battling stomach cancer, pictured in 2009. Source: Getty

Justice Edgar Nathan Jr gave Ms Vanderbilt full-time custody. But he commentedthe court had wasted a month on "the resolution of problems which mature, intelligent parents should be able to work out for themselves".

Ms Vanderbilt married Lumet in 1956 and lived with him and her children in a 10-room duplex penthouse on Gracie Square. She divorced Lumet and married Cooper in 1963.

Their elder son, Carter, a Princeton graduate and editor at American Heritage, killed himself in 1988 at age 23, leaping from his mother's 14th floor apartment as she tried to stop him.

Police said he had been treated for depression and friends said he was despondent over a break-up with a girlfriend. Ms Vanderbilt says in "Nothing Left Unsaid" that she contemplated following him out the window, but the thought of how it would devastate Anderson stopped her.

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