Gloria Guinness (born María Gloria Josefina Rubio y Alatorre; 27 August 1912 – 9 November 1980)

Biography

Gloria Rubio y Alatorre was born on 27 August 1912. Most accounts place her birth in Guadalajara, Mexico, though Gloria herself sometimes claimed Veracruz instead, one of several details about her early life she was known to shade to her advantage.

Her father, José Rafael Rubio, a journalist who had opposed the regime of Porfirio Díaz and been forced into political exile, died when Gloria was five, leaving the family unsettled amid the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution. 

As a young woman, Gloria worked as a nightclub hostess before leaving Mexico for Germany.

Gloria's first marriage, in 1933, was to a Dutch businessman named Jacobus H. Scholtens; the couple divorced in 1935. 

That same year, Gloria married Franz Egon, Graf von Fürstenberg-Herdringen, a German count, becoming Countess von Fürstenberg-Herdringen. The marriage produced two children, including a daughter, Dolores, and ended in divorce in 1940.

In 1942, Gloria married Ahmad Fakhry Bey, an Egyptian aristocrat and grandson of King Fuad I. Between her marriages, she was also linked romantically to the British naval officer David Beatty, 2nd Earl Beatty, and to the diplomat Duff Cooper, the same Duff Cooper whose attentions the socialite Daisy Fellowes was said to be competing for during these years. 

Gloria's marriage to Fakhry Bey ended in divorce in 1949. Two years later, in 1951, she married her fourth and final husband, the British-American financier Thomas "Loel" Guinness, who had made his own fortune in banking and real estate rather than in the family's brewing business.

By the time Gloria became Mrs. Loel Guinness, she reportedly held no valid passport and was not legally a citizen of any country, a genuinely unusual position for a woman about to become one of the most photographed figures in the world. 

The marriage brought its own tangled family history. Loel's son from an earlier marriage, Patrick Benjamin Guinness, married Gloria's daughter Dolores, making her own stepson also her son-in-law. Patrick died in 1965.

As Mrs. Loel Guinness, Gloria became a fixture of the era's most rarefied circles, and, from 1963 into the early 1970s, a contributing editor at Harper's Bazaar, writing on style and society from firsthand experience of both.

 Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy counted her among their most admired muses; she also wore Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Halston, and helped popularize Pucci's capri pants as a staple of 1960s leisurewear. 

Eleanor Lambert placed her on the International Best Dressed List every year from 1959 to 1963, then inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1964. Photographers including Cecil Beaton and Slim Aarons returned to her again and again.

Of her own approach to clothes, Gloria said simply: "Fashion should be a form of escapism, not a form of imprisonment."

Persistent rumors, never substantiated, held that Gloria had worked as a spy for German intelligence during the Second World War, a claim that has followed her reputation ever since without ever being resolved either way.

Later in her life, financial pressure caught up with the glamour. Gloria's jewelry collection, including a notable diamond rose brooch, was sold at Sotheby's Parke Bernet on 20 November 1975.

Gloria Guinness died in Épalinges, Switzerland, on 9 November 1980, at sixty-eight. 

She was buried at the Bois-de-Vaux Cemetery in Lausanne, the same cemetery that holds the grave of Coco Chanel, another woman who had spent much of her own life reinventing the story of where she came from.