Ingrid Sischy, a fashion editor and writer with fifty years of experience in the industry, died Friday at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center after a long battle with breast cancer. She was was 63.
The industry veteran was a longtime Interview magazine editor who got her start working at the Museum of Modern Art before becoming editor of Artforum in 1980. In 1990, she took over Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Though she expected to stay only a few years, she remained at the publication for almost two decades, expanding its focus to all things fashion, art, music, photography, films and pop culture. Sischy left in 2008 and later became a European editor for Vanity Fair’s international brand.
Despite her role as a high-profile editor, Sischy made sure to keep up with her writing. She contributed to Vanity Fair and served as a photography and fashion critic for The New Yorker. One of her most impressive interviews was conducted in 2013, when Sischy snagged the first interview with John Galliano after he was ousted from the house of Dior for making anti-Semitic statements.
“Her health was up and down, but her spirit and her work ethic remained heroically steady. Not once did I ever hear her complain about the fate she had been dealt,” Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said in an obituary for the magazine. “Or even talk about it much. She just got on with things. There were so many aspects of her character to admire, but I found her saucy, cheerful stoicism to be highly attractive.
“Ingrid was a great friend and therefore she had a lot of friends. And they will be utterly bereft for the next little while, so be kind to them,” Carter continued. “They will be the ones wandering the streets, or just staring off into the middle distances, lost in the knowledge that a beloved original in an age of generics has gone somewhere else and left them behind.”
Sischy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1952 to a physician father and a speech therapist mother. They first moved to Scotland when she was nine years old and then to the United States when she was a teenager. She is an alum of Sarah Lawrence College, where she discovered a passion for fashion.
Her most recent piece for Vanity Fair — a profile on child model and Karl Lagerfeld’s godson Hudson Kroenig — is slated to run in the magazine’s September issue.