Vogue Pays Homage To 60’s Icon Marisa Berenson

In Vogue Magazine’s online offshoot, Vogue.com, Editor at Large for the European territory, Hamish Bowles has an insightful heart to heart with Marisa Berenson, who in recent years was known as the sister of model and photographer Berry Berenson, who tragically perished when the plane flying her back home to California crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Her sister famously took several amazing shots of Marisa and some of them are included in the collection that Vogue Magazine decided to feature as part of their celebration of their once valued cover girl.

Vittoria Marisa Schiaparelli Berenson has lived a life that most of us can only dream about and beg the gods to bless us with. Her name alone evokes images of privilege, blue-blood lineage and fame. She embodies all of these; after all she was born to a Countess and a handsome diplomat. Her grandmother, the Italian-born Elsa Schiaparelli engraved her sense of style in the fashion world for generations to come. She and her younger sister Berinthia who was fondly known as Berry were parlayed into a world rich in culture and decadence.  Berry captured the artistic moments by becoming a photographer, and her older sister Marisa was her frequent subject while also posing for some of the world’s most formidable photographers of that time including Irving Penn and Henry Clarke. From her moment of “discovery”, which was courtesy of Vogue’s Diana Vreeland, to her incredible portfolio of worldly collages, Berenson was a force to reckon with in the 60’s and 70’s and she has not simmered down yet. Actors, Terrence Stamp, Sam Shepard and Kevin Kline, music composer Bryan Ferry and Arnaud de Rosnay who was heir to a sugar fortune and also a gifted photographer who used Berenson as his inspiration, all fell under the spell of the dazzling model and actress.

Exotic locales, dashing suitors, and glamorous parties, Marisa Berenson’s life reads like a fairy tale come true.  She has no doubt had her share of tragedy and pain, but the ever-luminous muse and mother of an equally irresistible daughter can’t deny that it has been an unforgettable ride so far.

To find out more about her enchantingly eclectic life story, pick up her new book Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures.