Through the homes she decorated, the clothes she wore and the objects she collected, Lee Radziwill expressed a sensibility entirely her own, holding on to the things that mattered to her
Por Letícia Lima Laurino
The bedroom was fuchsia, including the bed. Lee Radziwill had designed it to the exact dimensions she wanted. When Harper's Bazaar asked her to name her favorite place at home, she chose the bed.
Years earlier, a sitting room in London had proved more difficult. Long and narrow, with doors and windows that complicated the arrangement of furniture, it seemed to resist every attempt at decoration. Lee turned to Renzo Mongiardino, who cut and recombined printed Indian cottons, using them on the walls, curtains and lampshades. At one end of the room, he placed a divan. It was there that Cecil Beaton photographed Lee with her daughter Tina in 1966. She wore a caftan she had received as a gift from King Hassan II of Morocco.
Her collaboration with Mongiardino extended to Turville Grange, her country home in England. In the interiors they created together, fabrics covered the walls, and the children’s favorite animals appeared in paintings throughout the rooms. Lee liked to begin with a traditional foundation and add unexpected elements. Years later, while preparing lectures on interiors, she revisited what she had learned from her homes in England. Her notes covered the restoration of Turville, its lighting and gardens, but also the children and animals that were part of domestic life.
The president of Americana Hotels came to see Lee’s apartment in person after discovering it in Architectural Digest, and other projects came her way as a result of that visit. The hotel group became one of the first clients of the decorating firm Lee Radziwill opened in 1976. She acknowledged having no formal training in the field: she had learned by working on her own homes and drawing on her knowledge of art history, an interest she had cultivated since her youth.
While still a teenager, Lee sought out Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, his home in Italy. The historian, a specialist in the Renaissance, began corresponding with her. In her letters, Lee shared her enthusiasm for art and the pleasure she took in spending time in museums and galleries. Their correspondence continued until his death.
No Harper's Bazaar, where she worked as Diana Vreeland’s assistant in 1952, Lee briefly experienced life on the other side of the fashion pages. Fifteen years later, Vreeland, then at Voga, brought Lee and photographer Bert Stern together for a ten-page editorial. Lee would remember Stern’s photographs as some of her favorites, for the way they captured her laughter and sense of freedom.
In photographs of her daytime outfits, a shirt cinched at the waist might be paired with slim trousers and flat shoes. Oversized sunglasses covered much of her face. For the Black and White Ball that Truman Capote hosted at the Plaza in 1966, she chose a sequined dress and a silk coat by Mila Schön. Both pieces were later donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Years afterward, they could still be seen together in exhibitions devoted to Italian fashion.
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Lee remembered her first Armani outfit just as clearly. For a fashion show at Rockefeller Center in 1980, she wore a black-and-white striped blouse with almost pointed shoulders and a long black velvet skirt. In 1985, she became the brand’s director of special events, attending fittings in Milan and helping connect the designer with figures in Hollywood. Their friendship also allowed for less formal advice: she would tell Giorgio that he needed to smile more.
Moving house did not mean starting over. Lee said she bought things with the intention of keeping them, and the objects she fell in love with accompanied her around the world. Among the possessions she retained were models supplied by Mongiardino and Indian paintings on glass, with frames he had designed. Even after leaving a house, she took with her pieces connected to the interiors they had created together.
Warhol, too, remained close. Their friendship had yielded portraits and Polaroids in which Lee enjoyed seeing herself looking more relaxed. In the fuchsia bedroom, a photograph of the two of them hung above the desk. It was in that same room that, during an interview, she was asked which living person she most admired. “Myself,” she replied. She said she had been through a great deal entirely on her own. And in the room she had designed for herself, the answer seemed perfectly at home.