Patricia Creed

Patricia Aileen Cunningham, fashion editor and model: born 21 January 1921; Fashion Editor, Vogue 1951-63; married 1948 Charles Creed (died 1966); died London 3 March 2007.

As haute couture reached a zenith in the Fifties, Patricia Creed presided over the fashion pages of Vogue with iron determination and considerable flair, although she made the transition to the Swinging Sixties with reluctance and less success.

In the early 1940s she had briefly been the "house model" for a number of British couturiers, including Hardy Amies, but by 1946 she was a fixture at Vogue and a favourite of the American photographer Clifford Coffin. Patricia Cunningham (as she was then) was one of the models he took to a fashion shoot at Stonehenge, which was aborted when Coffin declared that the standing stones were not big enough and the wrong colour and was observed kicking them in disgust. She modelled for Norman Parkinson and Cecil Beaton with less fuss.

Amies introduced her to Charles Creed, scion of the French fashion house that had first prospered under Napoleon, and in 1948 they were married. This did not hinder Patricia's progress at Vogue and shortly afterwards she was appointed "accessories editor", her role to find shoes, hats, belts and gloves for fashion sittings.

In 1951, she was promoted to be fashion editor by Vogue's editor Audrey Withers, a Fabian intellectual who had no interest in fashion and, as her memoirs revealed, little interest in editing Vogue. Given a great degree of autonomy, Patricia Cunningham (and she was always "Miss Cunningham" at Vogue) transformed the fashion pages. She hired the American Henry Clarke, whose extravagant pictures of elegant sang-froid sum up the Vogue Fifties, and during her tenure Helmut Newton made his earliest pictures. She dropped Coffin (too volatile) and encouraged Beaton to stay. She enjoyed a cordial, though not warm, relationship with Norman Parkinson before he left in 1959. She encouraged an often-reluctant William Klein to take fashion photographs. His film Qui êtes-vous Polly Maggoo? (1966) was a satire on his Vogue years.

A high point for Cunningham was Vogue's first trip to the Middle East in 1961 with Klein. His habit of shooting with a telephoto lens at a considerable distance from his subject led to a strange encounter with a jeep-load of location scouts for Lawrence of Arabia. They chanced upon the model Dorothea McGowan, quite alone, and "rescued" her, having mistaken her arm-waving fashion pose for a distress signal. They wondered, on reflection, why she was wearing an evening dress and jewellery in the sand dunes of the Valley of the Dead Sea.

Although Cunningham approved the hiring of David Bailey in 1961, she remained immune to his charm until making a trip to Mexico with him and Jean Shrimpton when she found the pair delightful. Bailey recalled that, of all the fashion editors then, "she was the most liberal-minded". Nevertheless, she lamented that in Vogue's pages soignée Italian principessas had yielded to gawky English models. She spotted a young Jean Muir, then a designer at Jaeger, encouraged her to set up on her own and interviewed potential backers. A grateful Muir dressed her free of charge from then on and she became one of Cunningham's closest friends.

Colleagues and collaborators valued Cunningham's judgement and her forthright opinions - but less so their brusque delivery. In 1963, she quarrelled with Withers's successor, Ailsa Garland, to the extent that Garland recalled it in Lion's Share (1970) as "a flare-up which made a professional rift beyond repair and she left the magazine". Garland herself barely made it to the end of the year and Cunningham was briefly reappointed in an ad hoc advisory capacity. She was also of great service to Vogue's food pages, being close to the cookery writer Elizabeth David; of all the magazine's staff, Cunningham was the only one stern enough to force David to finish her articles.

Born in 1921, Patricia was the eldest of the six children of Arthur Cunningham, a newspaper editor in Constantinople, and his second wife, Aileen Lovatt-Turner. Between them, Arthur and Aileen Cunningham spoke 20 languages and were fluent in several Middle Eastern dialects.

Patricia's childhood was spent in Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt, before the family moved to London in 1930, her father having gone into insurance at Lloyd's. The Cunninghams' circle included diplomats and politicians and one of Patricia's earliest admirers was the young John F. Kennedy, whose father Joseph was the American ambassador to London. (Patricia's brother, Jim, broke Edward Kennedy's wrist by pushing him down the stairs at the ambassador's residence, Winfield House).

At 17, Patricia was sent to a Swiss finishing school and, upon her return to London, in an act of rebellion against her father's wishes, joined the WRNS. She had inherited her parents' aptitude for languages and was seconded to Bletchley Park's code-breaking team. Taught Japanese in less than three months, she became fluent enough to become her unit's chief translator and was made an officer. In 1943, she was despatched to Candy in Ceylon, under the assumption that, with the name Lt Pat Cunningham, she was a man. The situation was rectified and she was moved on to Singapore as a personal secretary to Lord Louis Mountbatten.

After VJ Day, demobbed and back in London, she fell in with a Bohemian crowd that congregated around Notting Hill, where she met a fashion photographer and began modelling.

Her marriage to Charles Creed was a challenging one. In Maid to Measure (1961), a jovial, ghost-written autobiography, Creed concluded: "I have grown old and grey and rather bald in the pursuit of my profession and the opposite sex - and I still cannot think of a better way to spend one's time . . ." Patricia later said that the dedication at the front was the only accurate aspect of the book. Much of Creed's time was spent adding to a collection of Napoleonic porcelain militaria, one of the finest in private hands, and of First Empire lead soldiers (now in the Imperial War Museum).

In 1966, news of her husband's death from a heart attack reached Patricia in Rome, where she had been working for the shoe designer Ferragamo. The house of Creed had been spiralling downhill for sometime and had been propped up by Patricia's brother-in-law, Toby Bromley, of the Russell and Bromley shoe dynasty. He supported Patricia for the rest of her life in a flat in Chelsea and she was employed by Russell and Bromley as a "trend predictor" until 1996, remaining a familiar figure at the fashion shows. Not only did she trail behind her an illustrator (to record the presentations) but for many years too her Jack Russell terrier, Jimmy, which behaved impeccably for her but was abominable to everyone else.

Robin Muir