Lagerfeld, too, remained imperious when the mask slipped. Even when she made the mistake of courting the filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, who wound up filming the documentary “Grey Gardens” about her mentally ill hoarder relatives, Radziwill maintained her mask of peerless sophistication. Nonetheless, Lee would use the honorific “Princess” without hesitation for much of her life - and the media bought into it.

Radziwill spent her entire life jealous and resentful of her sister Jackie, but it was Jackie’s marriage to Jack Kennedy that propelled Lee into the highest echelons, allowing her to ditch her disappointing first husband for a dispossessed prince with a meaningless title. She taught them how to act as though they were to the manor born, and both girls, native Long Islanders, emerged with curious lifelong, haughty-yet-geographically indeterminate accents. And status was perhaps the only thing he had in common with his wife, Janet, who soon divorced him, remarried a wealthy broker and raised her girls with one decree above all others: Marry for money and status, not love. Their father was a drunk, a womanizer and a gambler who squandered the family’s modest fortune - a man who was so status-obsessed he bought a custom-built car during the worst of the Depression. Among their ancestors was a maid and a cabinet maker. Both claimed to be descendants of French aristocrats, when in fact they were more working-class Irish Catholic than anything - at least half Irish and just one-eighth French. Likewise, Radziwill, along with sister Jackie, fabricated much of her origin story. He would say he had a personal butler at age 4, a French tutor at age 5 and a childhood spent in a castle.

Lagerfeld hid his real birth date for most of his life and claimed his parents had been wealthy aristocrats. Both were icons not just of fashion but a kind of glamour that no longer exists: remote, aspirational and entirely self-mythologized. Karl Lagerfeld and Lee Radziwill died within two days of each other, each aged 85, and such proximity seems apt. Walls close in on Alec Baldwin as his gun lie falls apart New witness statements show Brad Pitt may be the villain of the story Sheryl Sandberg has finally been exposed as a fake feministĭoesn't 'ring' true: Impossible to take Ben Affleck's privacy pleas seriously after extravagant J.Lo wedding Toddler and tiara: Meghan Markle STILL throwing tantrums about royal family

The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake