Carrie Donovan, who died on November 12th aged 73, was the last of that generation of New York fashion editors who flew to PA-ree for the collections and pronounced them DEE-vine! As couturier Karl Lagerfeld said, she covered fashion when it was fantastic fun and before it was a retail index indicator: "Today, you feel it's almost not decent to like fashion - and she loved fashion."
Carrie Donovan, born in Lake Placid, New York state, went to Parsons School of Design in New York, although she couldn't sew - she bribed classmates to stitch her testpiece. She worked in Paris in the early 1950s and returned to New York to design for a junior dress firm. She was nearly 30 before she entered journalism as a reporter on the women's page of the New York Times, then as associate fashion editor.
Her break came in 1963 when she joined Vogue under Diana Vreeland, who recognised her as an inspired acolyte: "It's not good enough for you," she told Carrie Donovan, advising her to reject a job offer. "You should be working for some huge company. My dear, you've got the common touch." She later joined Harper's Bazaar as senior fashion editor in 1972, and in 1977 returned to her true home at the New York Times, as an editor responsible for style, especially on the magazine, where she remained until retirement in 1995, coming back in 2000 as guest columnist.
In the years away, she had taken the Vreeland advice about the big company, and became a television celebrity fronting for the crazy-but-cheap Old Navy discount subdivision of Gap. First, in 1995, she wrote fictional memos for its print ads - "All these cute clothes and they cost a dollar. Nice outfit, no?!!" - then she joked "Oh, I'd be awfully good on TV". They took her at her word and starred her in three years of TV ads opposite Magic, an Airedale dog: she joined the Screen Actors Guild.
A colleague explained: "We never really fully understood when we used Carrie the impact she would make for the brand and pop culture." She was enthused by the gig - "I devote my energies to convincing young people to dress oddly, it gives us old people a real hoot." The big, round glasses, remade for the screen with non-reflective lenses, were part of the permanent uniform, as were fake zebra or leopard coats, black sweater, straight skirt and jangling, clacking bracelets.
Carrie Donovan caught one of the many talented youngsters she mentored imitating her with rolls of Sellotape up to the elbows in lieu of bangles and two more for specs. She wore the current look from the hottest house, but always subordinated to her signature style - she was over 6 ft, without a butterpat of fat on her frame, heroic hands always in motion - "an American navvy . . . doused in perfume," as designer Lucy Sisman described her.
Carrie Donovan was never in accord with the New York Times's puritan spirit; to clear her Fashions of the Times supplements she had to appeal to tiers of male superiors up to editor Abe Rosenthal.
Combativeness shaped her editing style. She tore up layouts and copy, and her approval, expressed through her CD logo on the corner of work - small C, curly D - was hard-won and much desired. She didn't deal in subtlety when writing, either. She never mastered typewriters, but sat in misery in her dim-lit office, composing by hand in huge characters on a notepad, each page torn off and tossed on the floor, from where it was retrieved by her steely Miss Moneypenny of a secretary, typed up and occasional verbs inserted. "Do sentences need verbs?" she wondered. "Give me another word for beige," she once growled in mid-scrawl at a scared junior. The woman suggested stone, or perhaps ivory. She rolled her eyes to heaven. "No, no," she said. "Scarlet."
Carrie Donovan had met everyone who mattered in the trade when they were label-less aspirants, and encouraged them. Ralph Lauren, who thought "her voice was very important to me in my early career", claimed she inspired him to change direction: "I started out in men's wear, and when I met her I knew I was in the women's business."
Her lifestyle was modest, especially at the New York Times where she lunched in the canteen and took the subway to work.
She did not recognise any such thing as a private life. Socialisation was for work and her assistants were familiar with the "Get ready for six, we're going to a party" phone call. She lived in a succession of peculiar premises in the Hamptons, wittily decorated, and weekended in rotation with Perry (Ellis), Calvin (Klein) and Ralph (Lauren); if her walker, the "DEE-vine Roberrrt", didn't accompany her, an assistant would send flowers in advance so she could exclaim "Ohmygod" at an "admirer's" offering. Reliable ragtrade rumour has it that she took her annual holiday in a nudist colony.
She is survived by a sister.
Carrie Donovan: born 1928; died, November 2001