If You Knew Suzy

When the mighty Hebe Dorsey, fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, died in 1987, it looked as if life on Paris's couture circuit was going to be less diverting. Who, after all, could be quite as queenly as Hebe—an amply curvaceous woman with a sharp profile and sharper tongue who, garbed unabashedly in madeto-order splendor, suggested a cross between Mae West and Louis XIV? Her

successor, the London Independent's ever articulate Suzy Menkes, seemed a trifle too academic, more like a wellpaid headmistress than a fashion diva. But the power of her post and Paris, to which Menkes regularly commutes from London, began to exert their alchemic influence. Soon she was confidently spearing such sacred icons as Armani and Saint Laurent—as she bravely did last spring—and growing into commensurate splendor, bristling with 3-D Lacroix ornamentation and inflated hairstyles. It's a fashion evolution more riveting than anything happening on the runways.