Babs Simpson (born Beatrice Crosby de Menocal; – ) was an American magazine editor. She is best known for her 25-year tenure at ''Vogue'' as a

fashion editor A fashion editor is a person that supervises the process of creating, developing and presenting content for the fashion department of a magazine, Web site, newspaper or television program. The work of a fashion editor can be quite varied and may ...

Biography

The oldest of four children, Simpson was born in 1913 in Beijing (then called Peking), China, to Daniel Ammen de Menocal, a banker from an aristocratic Cuban family, and Beatrice (Crosby) de Menocal, a New York City socialite. The family lived in South America before settling in Boston, Massachusetts. Simpson married William Simpson in 1935 and moved to

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, New York; they divorced seven years later. In 1944, two years after moving to Manhattan, Simpson obtained (through a friend) a position at ''Harper's Bazaa''r, working in a photographer's studio. She was then hired to work for the magazine itself, under editor

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. In 1947, she left ''Harper's Bazaar'' to work at ''Vogue'', where she would remain until 1972. As a fashion editor, Simpson covered fashion shows and produced photo shoots. She collaborated with the photographer Irving Penn on many of his iconic images. She styled what would become

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's final photo shoot, photographed by

Bert Stern Bertram Stern (October 3, 1929 – June 26, 2013) was an American commercial photographer. Biography Stern was the son of Jewish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn. His father worked as a children's portrait photographer. After dropping out of ...

a month before her death. After leaving Vogue, Simpson worked at ''House & Garden'' magazine from 1972 until it was shuttered in 1993. In 2006, at the age of 93, Simpson became the oldest person to be featured in ''Vogue'', when she appeared in its annual Age Issue. In 2012, at age 99, she was featured in ''In Vogue: The Editor's Eye'', an HBO documentary about the fashion editors at ''Vogue''. Simpson was in a 35-year relationship with art dealer Paul Magriel; they lived in separate apartments in the same Manhattan apartment building throughout their relationship and did not marry. Simpson owned a Paul Lester Weiner-designed modernist home in

Amagansett Amagansett is a census-designated place that roughly corresponds to the hamlet by the same name in the Town of East Hampton in Suffolk County, New York, United States, on the South Shore of Long Island. As of the 2010 United States Census, t ...

, New York, built for her in 1963. She spent her later years in a retirement community in Rye, New York. She died on January 7, 2019, at the age of 105, in Rye.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Simpson, Babs 1913 births 2019 deaths Vogue (magazine) people Fashion editors American centenarians Women centenarians American women editors American magazine editors Women magazine editors People from Beijing American people of Cuban descent 21st-century American women American expatriates in China