Dear Shaded Viewers,
I really had no intention of writing this, but since her death the outpouring of tributes, respect and words about Jacqueline de Ribes led me to think about why? Many questions formed in my mind, and I want to put down a few words to crystallise my thoughts, but also perhaps to explain why the death of a ninety six year old woman of high society has been so marked.
Firstly, she was not a parvenue, but a true aristocrat born Jacqueline Bonnin de La Bonninière de Beaumont on 14th July 1929 in Paris to Jean Bonnin de La Bonninière, Comte de Beaumont (1904–2002) and his wife, Paule de Rivaud de La Raffinière (1908–1999), both belonging to the French aristocracy. When she was ten at the outbreak of war she was sent away with her siblings and her war years as a child were marked by living through the occupation and moving around. by moves and the occupation.
After the war she returned to school and aged nineteen married Vicomte Édouard de Ribes, a successful banker who later became Comte de Ribes and Officer of the Legion of Honour, Croix de guerre 1939–1945.They had two children, Elisabeth born in 1949, and her husband Franck van der Kemp, who is the son of Gerald van der Kemp who was responsible for the restoration of Versailles in post war years. Their daughter, Alix van der Kemp married Count Pierre de la Rochefoucauld in 2004 thus linking to one of the noblest family names in France dating back hundreds of years. There is also a son Jean, Comte de Ribes, born in 1952 and described by his mother as “intellectual”. The Vicomte de Ribes died in 2013.
De Ribes always displayed a huge interest in fashion, and clothes, and from the early 1950’s onwards she began designing her own clothes, as well as buying from the couture of Balmain or Yves Saint Laurent amongst others. She employed couture dressmakers and as early as 1955 she employed Oleg Cassini to make her couture clothes based around toile patterns she cut herself. She also employed a young Italian named Valentino Garavani to create the sketches that accompanied them. Later in the 1970’s de Ribes fashioned elaborate fancy dress costume by cutting up and reusing old gowns she owned, creating extraordinary fantasy looks.
Jacqueline de Ribes attended all of the greatest parties of her time, wearing these beautiful looks of her own creation, these now legendary events of the attendees, beauty and style, The Proust Ball, Le Bal Oriental, and she was often photographed at these events, a favourite of Vogue and WWD.
Yet, beside all this fashion she was also working hard with involvement in cultural activities such as the 1958 inaugural production at the newly opened Le théâtre Juliette Récamier, which incidentally has just reopened. She took on the role of manager and administrator of the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas, helping create costumes and sets. She has produced films and worked as a columnist for Marie Claire and has worked with many charities including The European Alliance Against Cancer, ecological fund raising, and medical research and for some years UNICEF. She was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur for many different contributions in areas of support and fundraising across many decades.
Of course, in the end Jacqueline de Ribes launched her own fashion house, from 1982 until 1995, producing beautiful collections and which received complimentary reviews even from hardened journalists. Her innate sense of style and good taste, but also her knowledge of construction, drape, proportions, and fabrics all came together for over a decade in her house. I saw many of these collections and they were superb in transferring her view and experience of wearing clothes into styles, looks and pieces for the many women who required access to the elegance and refinement of de Ribes to give them confidence,
Ten years ago in November 2016, “Jacqueline de Ribes, The Art of Style” exhibition opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, also with a fascinating accompanying book, which I’m referring to as I write these words. The book details her wardrobe from other designers, and also the creation of the fancy dress pieces she imagined and invented.
Photographs in Vogue, gossip by Suzy in Woman’s Wear Daily, election onto best dressed lists, and images by photographers such as Richard Avedon have made the Comtesse one of the great fashion figures of the past decades. Her proportions are perfect to dress, her profile, like those of Nefertiti or Streisand, invites notice, her wonderfully expressive eyes, her long neck, are extraordinary and her elegant posture makes clothes look stunning. Like a great model she knows her to use her line, pose, hold her hands, tilt her chin, it is an innate sense of style, there is nothing affected about it and it is elegant every time.
Yet, above all she has that extra something, that confidence, her interviews reveal her slow considered speech, her choices from designers as diverse as Norma Kamali to Guy Laroche, her decisions of not remaining simply an aristocratic hostess and wife. Her balance between tradition, old fashioned values and manners and her embracing of working at fund raising and awareness in the realities of cancer, of being simply herself.
She was born with an editorial eye, she was sure on how to balance privacy and her upbringing, with the demands of the press and changing times. Life had to be lived but in many different roles and ways, from the practical to the glamorous, although she herself thought “glamour” a totally American invention, and few women could be more French than Jacqueline de Ribes. She was not conventionally “pretty,” and she seemingly never suffered a lack of confidence or suffered fools. Jacqueline de Ribes was never” just” anything; beauty, aristocrat, wife, designer, fund raiser, manager, mother, her energy, and curiosity was boundless.
I am trying to sum up her departure and the responses to it, and I believe another woman used it in her words as the introduction to the exhibition book, Diane von Furstenberg, there is only one word for Jacqueline, Comtesse de Ribes – fearless.
Later,
Tony Glenville
