Sally Kirkland (editor)

Sally Kirkland (1 July 1912 – 1 May 1989) was a manager at Lord & Taylor, a fashion editor at Vogue magazine and served as the only fashion editor at Life magazine between 1947 and 1969.

Born as Sarah Phinney in a small town called El Reno (about 10 miles West of Oklahoma City) in Canadian County, Oklahoma, she was the daughter of Col. Robert Truman Phinney and his wife Ruth Ida "Minnie" Naill. She had one brother, Robert Phinney, Jr., who was a Vice President of Braniff International Airways. In the 1920s and 1930s Sally lived in Washington DC with her parents. She graduated from Vassar College in 1934. Sally was married in the early autumn of 1938 in New York City to Frederic McMichael Kirkland, the son of a wealthy Pennsylvania Main Line family; their only child is the actress Sally Kirkland, her mother's namesake.

After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she worked in the college shop at Lord & Taylor, then the headquarters for the best casual American clothes.

In 1939, Kirkland became an assistant editor of Vogue magazine and, by 1946, she was the magazine's fashion editor.

Kirkland joined Life magazine after working as a correspondent in the Pacific during World War II, and from 1947 to 1969 she was the publication's fashion editor; Kirkland has been credited with making the weekly magazine influential in the area of international fashion. She was noted as the first fashion editor to do multiple-model sittings, in which a dozen or so models would be stretched across one and even two pages; her innovation was widely copied. She stopped traffic in the Place de la Concorde in Paris to get a fashion picture. A cover photograph of Sybil Connally, the Irish designer, put Ireland on the fashion map. She put Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Faye Dunaway and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on Life magazine as fashion icons.

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