Geraldine Stutz stood with her slim five-foot-six frame ram rod straight, her large brown eyes staring at the floor, her thick hair pressed into a sophisticated wave, waiting nervously. “’My dear, you are too young,” Elizabeth Penrose Howkins, the editor in chief of told the twenty-three-year-old before her. “And you do not have enough experience.
” The pair were in Hawkins’s office on the nineteenth floor of a Lexington Avenue skyscraper, the Conde Nast headquarters, down the hall from It was 1947, and Geraldine had been working steadily for two years, since graduating from college, in junior editing jobs at movie magazines. This was fashion, though. A position at was everything.
While inexperienced, Geraldine had preternatural confidence for her age and obvious flair. “I shall hire you anyway,” Howkins suddenly concluded with a nod, “because you have style, and that’s the only thing we can’t teach you.” Geraldine could not believe her good fortune.
“I didn’t know beans about the fashion business,” she said. “The only way I could get around New York was to think of the East River as Chicago’s Lake Michigan.” A girl from north of Chicago, the product of years of strict Catholic schooling, Geraldine quickly found an apartment in the West Village with several roommates and took to city life, and her job, with vigor.
As associate fashion editor, Geraldine was responsible for sourcing accessories, especially shoes, that were featured in the ma.