Growing up in Manhasset, Lili Maglione yearned to sketch and paint the stylish clothing worn by fashionable women in 1940s New York City. But her father, an Italian immigrant and a hard-working landscaper, opposed his daughter’s early interest in art. “I was very interested in fashion as a teenager.
I wanted to be a fashion artist and have a career that way,” said Maglione, of Cold Spring Harbor. “But my parents wanted me to get married and have children.” As a young woman, Maglione said she refused to let her family’s expectations hold her back, embarking on an award-winning career that has spanned more than seven decades.
Now 95, she continues to blaze her own trail. The nonagenarian is at work on her latest series, “Unwoven,” inspired by what she sees as the divisions that have emerged in this country since the pandemic. She hopes to exhibit it once it’s completed.
“I’m very excited about what I’m doing right now,” she said. Lili Maglione in 2001 with one of her works. Credit: Morgan Campbell Determined to follow her dreams, Maglione said she worked her way through the now-defunct Traphagen School of Fashion in Manhattan, teaching ballroom dance classes while earning an associate’s degree in fashion art in the early 1950s.
After graduation, she said she headed up the fashion art offices for two Manhattan-based pattern companies and then completed her studies at the Art Students League, also in Manhattan. In 1957, at 28, she said she married Bern.
