“Elegant to the point of distraction,” was Oleg Cassini’s take on Jacqueline de Ribes. She was a woman whom the camera loved, with a beauty that sent people scrambling for the words to describe it.
“Vicomtesse de Ribes carries her own mark of beauty—vital fascination, plus the long slender neck, high cheekbones, the slanted dark-green eyes of an early polychrome Gothic figure,” was Vogue’s assessment in 1956. The “last queen of Paris” was another epithet. Emilio Pucci nicknamed her “giraffina” (baby giraffe); Truman Capote counted her among his swans. Yet in some senses she was more like a unicorn, the last vestige of a world of luxury and leisure, well documented in 1960s Vogue, that has long disappeared.
“I think that I’m the last survivor of so many things now,” de Ribes—who reportedly died this week at 96—said in a 2015 interview with Suzy Menkes on the occasion of a Costume Institute exhibition dedicated to her style. The show featured pieces from her archive, as well as costumes she made and designs from her namesake label, which she operated from 1982–1995. (Five years earlier, in 2010, she was decorated as a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy.)
In retrospect, it seems prophetic that de Ribes should have been born on Bastille Day in 1929. The daughter of Count and Countess Jean de Beaumont, her childhood was hardly a rococo revelry. Even as she experienced the war deprivations, having been sent away from home for safety, this youngster found ways to play with style, a preoccupation considered frivolous by her distant mother. She was married to Vicomte Édouard de Ribes before she turned 20.
Tall and lithe with a classical profile, de Ribes came into her fashionable self in the 1950s. “She enchants couturiers by working with them closely on fabrics and colors, then plunges them into despair by allotting only ten minutes to a fitting,” noted Vogue in a 1959 profile. Though perennially best-dressed, the countess was not content to be decorative. She was an avid skier and wrote a monthly column for Marie-Claire on the subject, she said, of “how to be chic on two francs,” among other activities.
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