Best Dressed Couples of All Time

Maureen "Mo" Starkey and Ringo Starr

The two Liverpudlians were together from 1965 to 1975, and had three children: Zak, Jason, and Lee. Their marital style was rock 'n roll in the truest sense - while Ringo sported long hair and fur coats, Maureen was decked out in psychedelic styles from The Fool. Mo was the most rebellious of all the London dollybirds - she experimented with changing hair colors (I have a fondness for her natural brunette with the blonde ends) and always rimmed her eyes with kohl liner. As they reached the 1970s, their look just became better and better as Mo adopted tough leather pieces and Ringo rocked an unkempt look in sports coats and worn-in shirts.

Carole Lombard and Clark Gable

The classic look of Clark Gable and his wife of three years Carole Lombard screams Old Hollywood. Stories still remain about the couple's relaxed unpretentious life on their ranch in Encino, California, raising horses and chickens. Gable favored a rough Americana style in broken-in Levis, button-down shirts, and boots, whereas Lombard took care of the ranch grounds in sundresses and high heels. Their look was sophisticated, yet with an earthy air.

Wallis Simpson and Prince Edward

The immaculate wardrobes of Wallis Simpson and her husband Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of the UK) are almost as legendary as the way these two came together. Wallis began having an affair with the beloved Prince of the United Kingdom. The Royal Family despised Wallis and gave Edward a choice: end the affair or abdicate the throne. Edward chose love over power and married the American socialite in 1937. While Edward favored clean suits in sensible colors, Wallis loved tailored dresses (usually long-sleeved) that hit mid-calf, usually accessorizing with a small hat. In the summer, the couple coordinated outfits in pastel pinks and light blues.

Iman and David Bowie

No marriage has so fully summed up the word 'glam' than the 18-year union of the first black supermodel and Mr. Ziggy Stardust. Iman is a legend in the fashion world for her graceful good looks, womanly fashion sense, and entrepreneurial prowess, whereas David Bowie is the messiah of glam rock androgyny. The couple is most certainly a "power couple" in every sense of the word - they command presence more so than anyone I know (of).

Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards

I would be eternally jealous of anyone who got to raid the wardrobes of Keith Richards and his common-law wifey Anita Pallenberg. Richards openly models himself after a pirate - in a mix of scuffed up leathers, velvets, chains, scarves, and skulls, Keith always looks cool in a way that you know he didn't try at all to get dressed. The bohemian vixen Miss Pallenberg is a legend to every girl with designs on a Mongolian lamb coat and a skinny guitarist of their own. Anita created a look so definably her own that certain gypsy-rocker fashions are dubbed "so Anita." I like looking through photographs of the duo at different times to see how they switched and swapped pieces from each other's wardrobes to create their outfits.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and muralist Diego Rivera created beautiful art together during their often tumultous two marriages. Rivera, almost always in a suit, tie, and boots, created a great visual contrast to the petite and beautiful Kahlo, who loved to dress in brightly printed skirts and dresses, lace tops, vibrant shawls, and thick wooden beads.

How about you? In your opinion, who are the best dressed couples of all time?

"champagne is champagne in a train more than anywhere."

On the surface, she seemed to be the ultimate high society flapper. The only daughter of Sir Bache Cunard, a baronet, and his American wife Maud Alice Burke (known as 'Emerald Lady Cunard' to the world), a doyenne of the London society set, Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) lived a life of privilege from an early age. She was heiress to the extremely wealthy Cunard transatlantic steamship company, founded by her grandfather. During the 1920s, Cunard came to symbolize the "new woman" of the decade. She was sensational - a gorgeous sight in exotic clothing, she had everyone hanging on her every word. William Carlos Williams called her "one of the major phenomena of history" and kept a photograph of her in his study. As a little girl, she "wanted to run away and be a vagabond," as she told family friend George Moore. Despite her upper class upbringing, Nancy rejected the ideals set forth by her family, instead choosing to live most of her life as an activist to issues such as fascism and racism. 
In 1910, after her parents separated, she moved with her mother to London. Her adolescence was checkered with times spent in Germany and France in boarding school, other times her mother was content to have her at home. During World War I, Nancy developed a relationship with Peter Broughton Adderley, a soldier who was killed in action only weeks before Armistice Day while in France. Within the year, a young Nancy was wed to Sydney Fairbairn, a veteran of the war and prized cricketeer. The marriage lasted less than two years, many allege it was because of Cunard's lasting grief over Adderley's death. It was during this time that she was associated with the influential group The Coterie (an Algonquin Table of sorts for the UK).

After her marriage ended, Nancy moved to Paris at the age of 24. It was in Paris that she became involved with the modernist, surrealist, and dadaist movements, publishing most of her poetry during her time there. She published three volumes of poetry: Outlaw (1921), Sublunary (1923), and Parallax (1925), the latter published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. She had a brief affair with Aldous Huxley, which would later prove inspiration for several of his novels, including Antic Hay and Point Counter Point, before starting a two-year relationship with Louis Aragon.

In a swirling mix of friends and lovers, Cunard was muse and mentor to some of the most celebrated and distinguished of artists - from writers including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Langston Hughes (who called her "one of my favorite folks in the world"), William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Louis Aragon, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda Henry Crowder, Mina Loy and Tristan Tzara. She posed for Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Constatin Brancusi, Alvaro Guevara, and Ambrose McEvoy. Cunard was also the inspiration for the character Diana Merrick, played by Greta Garbo, in the film A Woman of Affairs, based on the play The Green Hat. She was beautiful - a rail thin beauty swathed in expensive threads, and made up with smoky make up.

In the late 1920s, Nancy moved to Normandy, setting up the Hours Press in 1928 for young experimental writers. That same year she began a relationship with African American jazz musician Henry Crowder, who then was living in Paris. As a result of the relationship, Cunard became involved with politics, developing a passion for civil rights, even living in Harlem for a time - much to the horror of her mother (her mother was quoted as saying, "Is it true that my daughter knows a Negro?") She wrote Black Man and White Ladyship in 1931 and edited the anthology Negro, which contained early works from Zora Neale Hurston, WeB DuBois, and Langston Hughes.

Her appreciation for the African American community and culture translated over into her widely imitated style. Her arms were always festooned with African bangles, worn layered on top of each other up to both her elbows. She had a love of exotic prints, and wrapped turbans around her fashionably cropped hair. She kept her lips and nails painted in a deep vermillion red at all times.

During the years leading up to the Second World War, Nancy became deeply involved with fascist causes, frequently using the Hours Press to print pamphlets of war poetry. In WWII, she worked for the French Resistance as a translator. Of her political involvements, Cunard said "I've always had the feeling that everyone alive can do something that is worthwhile." After the war, Cunard left Normandy to travel the world. Her later years were plagued by mental illness, untreated throughout her life and aggravated by her severe alcoholism and self-destructive nature, causing her health to rapidly deteriorate. She was severely impoverished, and passed away in a Paris hospital in 1965 after being found on the street, only weighing 26 kilos (less than 60 pounds).

"I want to be a living work of art."

"Women of the world today all dress alike. They are like so many loaves of bread. To be beautiful one must be unhurried. Personality is needed. There is too much sameness. The world seems to have only a desire for more of this sameness. To be different is to be alone."

- The Marchesa Luisa Casati

No woman in the early half of the twentieth century was as decadently eccentric as the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the most notorious Italian heiress that has ever lived. Arguably the first true female dandy, Casati famously proclaimed that her life's goal was to become "a living work of art."

Born Luisa Adela Rosa Maria Amman in Milan in 1881 to a wealthy Italian family with royal heritage (her father was made a Count by King Umberto I), her parents death at age 15 left Luisa and her older sister Francesca the wealthiest women in Italy. She wed Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, Marchese di Roma in 1900. After the birth of their only daughter, Luisa left her husband and daughter in 1914 in order to reinvent herself as a patroness of the arts.

Standing at a near six-feet-tall and dressed in flamboyant European fashions, the Marchesa both delighted and horrified the aristocratic belle epoque. With her fiery red hair teased to a halo of curls and large, overwhelming green eyes - which she exaggerated with both thick rings of kohl and belladonna drops to enlarge her pupils to appear like emeralds - Luisa was like no other woman Italy had ever seen. She was deathly pale, with a cadaverous bone structure, and always kept her lips painted in her signature deep vermillion red.

After separating from her husband, the Marchesa moved into the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, a semi-ruined mansion along the Grand Canal in Venice that would play house to all her future exploits. Tales of her wildly eccentric personality are notorious. She wore live snakes as necklaces. She had male servants wear nothing but a sheet of gold leaf in her decaying Venetian mansion, which was decorated with wax mannequins which she placed in seats at the dinner table, and Chinese lanterns throughout the vast property. Infamous for her late-night walks, the Marchesa would stroll around the city with her two pet cheetahs on diamond-studded collars and leashes, while she wore scant more than a fur coat. Around the Palazzo roamed her exotic pet cheetahs, monkeys, peacocks and birds. In Venice she threw extravagant parties - masquerade balls, gothic black masses, and performances of the Russian ballet. Rumors of her party time attire still swirl - once the Marchesa was said to have worn a freshly-slaughtered chicken as a stole. Another party had her dressed in nothing but white feathers streaked with blood dried on her arms.

During the three decades that she mesmerized the Venetian society, she had affairs with both men and women, but her constant love was writer Gabriele D'Annunzio. A celebrity among the literati set, she was painted by Augustus John, Giovanni Boldini, Romaine Brooks, Kees van Dongen, and Picasso, photographed by Cecil Beaton and Man Ray, sculpted by Paolo Troubetzkoy, sketched by Drian and Alastair, and the inspiration of Erte, Jean Cocteau, Robert de Montesquiou, and Jack Kerouac. Some 200 portraits, sculptures, and drawings were made of her, as she wished to "commission her own immortality." She was also a patroness of fashion designers Poiret and Fortuny, and served as muse to Umberto Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, and F.T. Marinetti. Her affinity for exotic animals and jewels directly inspired Cartier's panther design.

By 1930, Casati's passion for couture, expensive jewels, and other extravagancies left her virtually penniless, in debt for $25 million. An auction of her personal collections drew many bidders, including Coco Chanel. Casati then moved to London, where she resided until her death in 1957. In those years, the fallen heiress was rumored to be seen digging around Mayfair trash bins for plumes of feathers to wear in her hair. After her death, she was buried in her finest black leopard skin piece, a pair of false eyelashes, and her taxidermied Pekinese dog. On her gravestone in Brompton Cemetery is a quote from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."

Despite living her final days in poverty, the enigmatic persona of the Marchesa lives on and continues to inspire. She is the namesake of the fashion house Marchesa, and is a personal icon of the house's designers Georgina Chapman (who recently posed as Casati in the March issue of Harper's Bazaar) and Keren Craig. Of Casati, Chapman has said, "Perhaps if she were alive today, she would be a designer. She squandered all of her money. Millions and millions. It's a good take on what's happening now. Her life was one of complete excess; then she had to reassess everything." Other designers, such as John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld, have looked to the late Marchesa for inspiration. Dita Von Teese has cited her, as well as Anna Piaggi and Isabella Blow, as a key style influence. She has also inspired many film characters, including Isabella Inghirami in Forse che si forse che no, La Casinelle in Dans la fete de Venise and Nouvelle Riviera, Ingrid Bergman's character in A Matter of Time, as well as Vivien Leigh's performance in La Contessa.

The life of Marchesa Luisa Casati was remarkable, and, at times, almost unbelievable. I adore her because she was truly an individual and became her life's wish: a living work of art. She lived for her self and her pleasure, and dared to do things that few others could even dream of.

I am eager to purchase the biography of her life, Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, and learn more about this fascinating figure in history.

Quotes about the Marchesa:

• "The story of the Marchesa Luisa Casati's life resembles a fable for our times ... The story of Italy's richest heiress at turn of the last century, whose married aristocratic life and progeny were cast aside to indulge in a dramatically theatrical existence ... She emerged a heroine, living the fantasy, all the way to the end." - Glass Magazine
• "Her carrot-coloured hair hung in long curls. The enormous agate-black eyes seemed to be eating her thin face. Again she was a vision, a mad vision, surrounded as usual by her black and white greyhounds and a host of charming and utterly useless ornaments. But curiously enough she did not look unnatural. The fantastic garb really suited her. She was so different from other women that ordinary clothes were impossible for her." - Catherine Barjansky
• "The Marchesa lived partly as a slave to her dream world. She had two venues; her palaces and her aristocratic circles. They served as stages where everyone was usually an actor, but when she made her entrance, they automatically became spectators or background extras." - Alberto Martini