US fashion icon, socialite Gloria Vanderbilt dead at 95

Gloria Vanderbilt, the “poor little rich girl” who lived a life at the highest levels of fashion, society and wealth as an heir to one of the greatest family fortunes in U.S. history, died on Monday at the age of 95, her son CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper said.

Vanderbilt became a fashion icon in the 1970s with an eponymous line of tight-fitting blue jeans that bore her signature and trademark swan logo. They were a musthave for any woman with aspirations to style. Vanderbilt wrote that as a girl she had considered becoming a nun, which would have been an incredible loss to the chroniclers of high society, celebrity and tumult.

Instead of a nunnery, she went on to a life that could have provided storylines for dozens of soap operas, romance novels, Broadway musicals and tear-jerker movies.