Women Fashion Models and Designer

Irene Galitzine, the Russian-Italy’s “fashion princess” who created the ‘palazzo pajama’ and changed the way women dressed at home, whose gowns clothed Jacqueline Kennedy, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn, died on Friday, Ansa news agency said. She was 88. The Russian aristocrat died in her sleep in her house in the Italian capital shortly before dawn, said her long-time assistant and spokeswoman Angela Savarese. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Descended from Russian nobility who fled after the 1917 revolution, the former fashion model set up shop in the 1940s, she shot to fame in 1960 when she launched a flowing silk pant outfit, quickly dubbed the ‘palazzo pajama’ by Diana Vreeland, the then influential editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar. She had long been inspired by Greta Garbo as the model for a modern, independent woman and, in the days when wearing trousers was still a male prerogative, she was seeking to make something that was liberating and yet elegantly feminine.

Galitzine said she and other Italian designers had a knack for creating fashions for the young and carefree during the swinging 1960s. “The French were more sophisticated, more complicated. The Italians were young and gay, they loved life, they were simpler,” she said in a 2000 interview with Women’s Wear Daily.
“It was a perfect way of dressing for our lives then. You could dance easily in them, and all you needed to wear with them was a pretty jewel.”
In a 1993 interview with W magazine, Galitzine argued for free-ranging dress styles and called the perfectly matched suit with shoes and a bag “a bore.”
“There’s no time anymore to get bags and shoes to go with every outfit,” she said. “You need basics that go with a lot of things. Black shoes, navy shoes. You don’t need yellow shoes.”
She sold the Galitzine brand in 1990 to Xines.

Irene Galitzine was born into an aristocratic family in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1916. Her father, Prince Boris Galitzine, was an officer in the Imperial Guard; her mother, Princess Nina Lazareff, came from the Caucasus. In 1919 they were compelled to flee by the Bolsheviks, and after a brief period in Constantinople settled at Frascati. When she was 10 months old, her family went into exile during the Bolshevik Revolution, moving to Rome, where they bought a house overlooking the Spanish Steps.
Galitzine was a widow and had no children. Funeral details were being worked out, Savarese said. Galitzine will be cremated.