Carmel White was a famous Irish-born American editor. She made the first fashion broadcast from Paris to the United States.
Background
She was born on August 21, 1887 in Dalkey, near Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of Peter White, managing director of the Irish Woolen Manufacturing and Export Company, and of Anne Mayne. As honorary secretary of the Irish Industries Association, an organization committed to finding markets for Irish home industries, her father helped arrange for the Irish Village at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). He had made most of the preparations when he died suddenly, a few months before the fair was to open. His wife decided to carry on his work and, leaving her children with relatives, she went to Chicago and supervised the village, a major attraction of the fair. She then opened a shop for Irish handicrafts in Chicago and in 1895 brought Carmel and her sister to America.
Education
Carmel was educated at a convent in Iowa, a private day school in Chicago, a boarding school in Wisconsin, and a convent in Brussels, Belgium.
Career
By the time White's schooling was completed, her mother had settled in New York City, where she owned a custom dressmaking firm. Young White often worked there as a helper. Occasionally she accompanied her mother on buying trips to the Paris couture collections. She discovered that she had what she later termed a "photographic" eye for fashion details; this was decidedly helpful to her mother in adapting Paris styles for her American customers.
During World War I, White joined the American Red Cross. She served in Paris, where she had charge of all Red Cross female personnel in the city. Her uniforms were made for her by Creed, considered the finest tailor in Paris.
The war over, and still without plans for her future, White drifted back into her mother's dressmaking firm. While preparing for a buying trip to Paris, she was asked by fashion columnist Anne Rittenhouse, who was unable to make the trip that season, to report on the collections for her. Rittenhouse was so pleased with White's meticulous notes that she wrote a letter of introduction for her to Edna Woolman Chase, editor of Vogue.
White joined Vogue in 1921 as an assistant fashion editor. Although she was now leading an active family and social life, Snow's professional responsibilities increased. In 1929 she was made American editor of Vogue, and in 1932, she became fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar, a move that alienated publisher Condé Nast and others of the Vogue staff, but gave her new freedom and opportunity to develop her editorial talents. Snow immediately set about making Harper's Bazaar - as Jessica Daves wrote later - "a fortress of fashion opinion dramatically expressed, dramatically presented, with a reputation for giving fashion photographers their fling. "
Using the work of photographer Martin Munkacsi, Snow introduced the action fashion picture - of a swimsuit-clad model running on the beach. With Munkacsi and Alexey Brodovitch, whom she hired as art director in 1934, she quickly created a smart new look for the magazine. Three years after joining Harper's Bazaar, Snow was named editor.
With such novelists as Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Colette writing for Bazaar, Snow achieved her ambition to make her readers "well-dressed women with well-dressed minds. " She attended all the Paris showings and is generally credited with bringing the designers Christian Dior and Balenciaga to prominence in the United States. Her trips to Paris were curtailed during World War II, but she was back there in December 1944, to report on the wartime collections.
Snow retired in late 1957, but continued as chairman of Harper's Bazaar's editorial board. She also continued to attend the Paris shows. She and her husband moved to a house they had purchased in County Mayo, Ireland, but because the climate was detrimental to her husband's health, they were not able to live there for long, and returned to the United States. In collaboration with Mary Louise Aswell, Snow had just completed work on her memoirs, The World of Carmel Snow (1962), when she died in New York City.