In a series we're entitling "Dead People We Wish We Would Have Known" we'll take a look at ... well, the title says it all, really. Our first: Elsie de Wolfe, (known to many as Lady Mendl); mother of interior decoration and a thoroughly modern Millie if ever one existed.
Why we want to be her bff:
Well, let's see: She was the first woman to dye her hair green (later tinting her locks a refreshing periwinkle). Elsie infamously made her entrance to a French duke's party dressed as a can-can dancer. She turned a cartwheel, leaving the stodgy bunch, comment dire ... nonplussed; however, Cole Porter sure got a kick out of it, immortalizing the event in his song "Anything Goes." If she passes muster with maestro Cole, she's golden as far as we're concerned.
Beyond the fact that she was doing yoga decades before America had even heard of it, as a decorator she was a smashing success. She brought light, leopard-print chintz and French antiques to every dark corner of previously Victorian rooms. Remarkable, too, was her innovation in essentially creating the notion that one "interior decorator" could oversee the entire renovation of a home's interiors, rather than a slew of upholsters, architects, craftsmen and artisans.
Parisian fashionables of the '30s anointed her the best-dressed woman in the world. I mean, come on, does it get any better? Janet Flanner reported in The New Yorker that upon seeing the Parthenon in Athens, de Wolfe cried, "It's beige –– just my color!" Really... how can you not not want to know her!
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