Reinaldo Herrera and I met around 35 years ago, while sitting opposite each other in fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert’s Fifth Avenue living room, overlooking the Central Park Reservoir.
We were flung together that afternoon to serve on the committee convened annually to finalize the winners of the International Best-Dressed List. This was my first appearance at the yearly secret synod, but probably something like his 20th, and so he eyed this callow newcomer with suspicion.
If you have never been subjected to the raking gaze of Reinaldo Herrera, you will not understand how existentially unsettling it could be. His appraising eye made you want to fidget and adjust everything about your deportment, words, and clothing. Clearly, I had been thrown into a lion’s den, filled with such formidable taste arbiters as Kenneth Jay Lane, with whom Reinaldo jousted fiercely over potential honorees, and Jerry Zipkin, coolly feigning disinterest.
Reinaldo was different from the other men at that gathering; he was different from other men, period. Everything about his demeanor that day—the way he crossed his legs, tied his ascot, placed his hand in his jacket pocket, and nibbled on Eleanor’s luncheon buffet—transfixed me.
Particularly alluring was his voice, which he had used to great effect when he had, in the 1960s, hosted a morning political and cultural talk show, Buenos Dias, on Radio Caracas Televisión in his native Venezuela. Whether speaking English, French, German, or Spanish, or switching back and forth among the tongues, Reinaldo enunciated his syllables with such plummy, limpid precision that even if you didn’t quite speak the language, you somehow understood what he was saying.
When I profiled his wife, the fashion designer Carolina Herrera, for Vanity Fair in 1995, I was pulled closer into his orbit. That article opened with a view of Reinaldo and Carolina hosting their annual New Year’s Eve party at Mortimer’s, then the hottest ticket in town. “Reinaldo, dashing in black tie, and Carolina, a Goyaesque vision in emeralds and a long black sheath,” I wrote, “glided in concert to greet late arrivals. Separating couples—Reinaldo taking the woman’s arm, Carolina the man’s—the Herreras too branched apart, like estuaries of the same river, as they found places for their last guests. Their streaming movements could have been choreographed, so smooth was the execution of their hostly duties.”
The remarkable, nearly 60-year alliance of Reinaldo Herrera and Carolina Pacanins was what in Yiddish is called bashert—preordained. The legend of the Herrera family centered around their 65-room 1590 ancestral hacienda, La Vega (the Valley), in Caracas, reputed to be the oldest continuously occupied house in the Western Hemisphere.
Carolina was no stranger to La Vega, as the social circles of the Pacanins and the Herreras tightly overlapped, and she was best friends with Reinaldo’s little sister. And, obviously, Carolina says, “you always fall in love with your best friend’s older brother.”
Although brought up mostly by his grandmother, in New York, Paris, and Caracas, Reinaldo idolized his ravishingly stylish mother, Mimi, to the point where he could recount the names of the dresses she ordered from Christian Dior (“Byzance” was one). His father, Reinaldo senior, was a nobleman who bore the hereditary 18th-century title Marqués de Torre Casa. He was, in C. Z. Guest’s estimation, “one of the best-looking men I ever saw.”
Reinaldo was educated in America, at St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts, Harvard, and Georgetown. His St. Mark’s classmate Henry Ziegler recalls the Venezuelan’s arrival there as “a breath of fresh air in the monastic atmosphere of a New England boys’ boarding school. I remember one occasion when he had his mother’s purple Rolls-Royce meet us at the end of the football field and spirit us into Boston for drinks at the Ritz, without bothering to burden the school with the news of our adventure.”
In his 20s, Reinaldo gallivanted about Europe making full use of his youth, looks, means, brains, and flirtatious charm. Among his paramours during this period were Tina Onassis and Ava Gardner. At a costume ball in Saint-Moritz, he scandalized guests by showing up with his intimate pals the Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes and Countess Marina Cicogna as a blasphemous version of the Holy Trinity, renamed “the Heavenly Partouze” (orgy).
Meanwhile, Carolina had impulsively married in 1958, when she was 18. When that incompatible union dissolved less than a decade later, she was free to wed Reinaldo, her first love, in 1968. “With her beauty and his family” they became “our royal couple,” a Venezuelan friend stated.
The two were regaled like royalty when they visited New York in the 70s. Carolina landed on the International Best-Dressed List seven times between 1971 and 1980, and Reinaldo twice, before he ascended to the Hall of Fame in 1983. In 1977, Interview ran full-page black-and-white portraits of Reinaldo and Carolina by Robert Mapplethorpe, whom the pair had met on a flight to Mustique, where they were staying with their close friend Princess Margaret.
Inevitably, Reinaldo and Carolina became Studio 54 habitués, and great friends of its founder, Steve Rubell. At Studio, “Steve was always slipping quaaludes into my pockets,” Reinaldo said. “Then he would forget and put in some more. I would have to empty my pockets every night.”
Carolina mentioned to another Studio 54 regular—her mother-in-law’s friend Diana Vreeland—that she was considering designing fabrics. The Vogue editor, an admirer of the young Venezuelan’s bombe style (Vreeland’s term), told her that textiles were “a boring idea” and advised her “to do dresses instead,” Carolina says. At the fledgling designer’s debut show, in 1980, droves of society swells turned out, along with, as Women’s Wear Daily reported, “a supportive husband flashing diamond cufflinks.”
While Reinaldo never officially worked for the brand, he did at least in its early days refer to himself as its “godfather.” Reinaldo only went back to work in earnest four years after another fortuitous Mustique encounter (involving a conga line, no less), this time with Tina Brown, then editor of the relaunched Vanity Fair. “I needed a contributor who was out every night and brought in the stories,” Brown explained. Although he had a professional journalistic background in television, Reinaldo still abided by a gentleman’s codes. He haughtily refused, at least at first, Brown’s offer of a salary.
When Graydon Carter took over as editor in 1992, he “was thrilled that [Reinaldo] decided to stay on,” he writes in his memoir, When the Going Was Good. Reinaldo’s job description varies depending on whom you ask. In his book, Carter (who nicknamed him “Reggie”) calls Reinaldo “a fixer.”
Aimée Bell, Vanity Fair’s former deputy editor, cites his “genius at placement, as seen at Carolina’s shows and Oscar parties.” He also, she notes, smoothed the way for the 2003 Young Royals issue by strategically bringing the photographer Prince Philipp von Hessen on board.
He functioned, too, as a one-man finishing school for young assistants, including Theresa Grill. “He taught me everything I knew about elegance and style,” she says. “How to hold yourself, what shoes to wear, what fur is nice, what fur ‘makes you look like a raccoon.’” Even Carter benefited from such interventions. “He brushed up my manners,” he says.
My experience was similar to that of Bob Colacello, who saw Reinaldo as “a connector, adviser, idea man. He opened many doors for me on my various V.F. stories on European royalty, such as then Prince Charles and King Juan Carlos of Spain.”
In my case, he not only proposed stories on otherwise inaccessible subjects such as Jacqueline de Ribes, but also served as a major source and liaison for some of my more rarefied features. Reinaldo was himself author of several columns, one on the fraught family ties between Princess Margaret and her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, and another about what it was like to be the Queen’s houseguest.
It almost goes without saying; Reinaldo was a royalist. For the Jacqueline de Ribes story, he and I traveled to Paris to attend the ceremony, held at the Élysée Palace, for Jacqueline’s decoration as a Cavalier of the Legion of Honor. While waiting for President Sarkozy to start the proceedings, Reinaldo scanned the vast room, which displayed in its décor both the fleur-de-lis and the French Republic’s monogram. “I am so happy to see that in this House of Democracy, the Bourbons are still present,” he remarked.
Reinaldo and I grew thicker after Eleanor Lambert bequeathed her International Best-Dressed List to the two of us, Carter, and Bell in 2003. The I.B.D.L. meetings would typically involve a PowerPoint, William Poll tea sandwiches, some former winners, and staff members from up and down the masthead. These sessions could get contentious, but they became great occasions for workplace bonding, too.
“Reinaldo was a grandee, but he treated kings and paupers with equal respect,” Carter observes. “It’s one of the reasons he was so popular around the office.”
Although Reinaldo’s tastes for the List leaned in a decidedly patrician direction—Sheika Moza bint Nasser was a favorite—some personalities he championed took us by surprise. He insisted on Lady Gaga, for example, in 2010, the same year she wore her infamous meat dress, made of raw flank steak, to the MTV Video Music Awards. “She reminds me of Gypsy Rose Lee,” he explained.
Because we were neighbors, Reinaldo routinely shunted me to and from the Vanity Fair office in his glossy black sedan with “RHNY” vanity plates. He was as punctual as a Swiss clock, and did not hesitate to reprimand me for tardiness. Reinaldo was, in fact, a master of the sharp rebuke. Christopher Hitchens’s 2001 takedown of Mother Teresa, not surprisingly, provoked his ire.
“Reg stormed into my office and said, ‘You’ve gone too far! I’m canceling my subscription!’” Carter recalls. “I had to tell him that he didn’t have a subscription. He was on the comp list.” No doubt his family received the brunt of these admonishments. “His tongue was sharp as a blade,” a friend says. “The rules were tough. The etiquette was brutal, but again you don’t build strong people without discipline!”
When Carter’s successor arrived at Vanity Fair in late 2017, Reinaldo was the first to submit a letter of resignation and ask for the removal of his name from the masthead. We continued to see each other for I.B.D.L. meetings, now held at my house or his, where he and Carolina invited me for lunch or dinner. Upon arrival, I might find Reinaldo upstairs stroking his luscious Labradoodle, Betty, with one hand and reading a history book with the other.
Although he had been a history major at Harvard, the only story I ever heard from his collegiate days concerned a notorious classmate’s expulsion for running a campus prostitution ring. Fortunately, I had rejected the advice he had pressed on me decades before: “Stay away from old people. Old age is contagious.”
On March 20, the first full day of spring, the sun shone on mourners filing into St. Vincent Ferrer, the Gothic Revival church on Lexington Avenue. A photographer loitered on the sidewalk, presumably expecting a mob of high-profile personalities.
Instead, what he saw was perhaps 250 attendees, a few recognizable, like Fran Lebowitz, Wes Gordon, William Ivey Long, and Carter, and others, like Reinaldo’s faithful driver Andres, not.
The placement could not have been better if Reinaldo himself had organized it. His former Vanity Fair colleagues gathered in a cluster on the right, toward the front. Carolina sat regally with her daughters on the front left pew, enormous pearls from Reinaldo glistening on her ears and around her neck. Just below the altar, the cinerary casket was banked by a glorious profusion of sweet peas, Reinaldo’s favorite flowers. Members of the New York Philharmonic played Verdi and two grandchildren read from Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
But it was the Reverend Boniface Ramsey—celebrant, homilist, and longtime Herrera acquaintance—who stole the spotlight with a few of his brief, secular remarks. He announced that Carolina had designed his damask vestment.
And he told a quick anecdote about Reinaldo, which gave the deceased something he relished: the last word, and laughter. Reinaldo, the Dominican priest recounted, had sternly pointed out to him that he was flying the Vatican flag not only inside out but also upside down.
Carolina, standing at the church’s threshold immediately after the service, assented to the words of one departing woman: “It was perfect.”
Reinaldo Herrera was born on July 26, 1933. He died on March 18
Amy Fine Collins is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. She is the author of The International Best-Dressed List: The Official Story