Long before there were influencers, there was Gloria Vanderbilt. Sometimes described in the social media era as an “original influencer,” perhaps it was a fitting turn of events when the American socialite and fashion designer joined Instagram in 2017.
While Vanderbilt passed in 2019, her Instagram account has seen a few rare updates over the last year thanks to her son, CNN anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper. The most recent update on April 29 features a vintage black and white reel of Vanderbilt on her wedding day—August 28, 1956—to Serpico and 12 Angry Men director Sidney Lumet.
“I found an old reel of film in a box my mom had stored away. It’s from 1956. Her wedding day to the great and kind Sidney Lumet,” the caption reads.
Vanderbilt’s wedding to Lumet was her third marriage. She married four times, and her marriage to Lumet ended in divorce in August 1963. They had no children together, but she had two sons with her second husband, orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski. Vanderbilt remarried for the fourth and final time in December 1963 to magazine editor and screenwriter Wyatt Emory Cooper; the marriage ended with his death in 1978. Vanderbilt had two more sons with her fourth husband, Carter, who died in 1988, and Anderson.
In February 2024, Cooper posted to his own Instagram account as well as Vanderbilt’s commemorating what would have been her 100th birthday last year. Vanderbilt was born in Manhattan, New York in 1924. That same day, Cooper also shared an illustration she painted of writer Truman Capote in 1956. In the two years Vanderbilt updated her Instagram account before her death, she often posted not just photos from her personal archives, but also images of her own original drawings and paintings.
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A post shared by Gloria Vanderbilt (@gloriavanderbilt)
“Over the course of her life, my mom was photographed by all the great photographers,” Cooper wrote in his eulogy for his mother in 2019. “She worked as a painter, a writer, an actress, and designer. If you were around in the early 1980s, it was pretty hard to miss the jeans she helped create. But that was her public face, the one she learned to hide behind as a child. Her private self, her real self, that was more fascinating and more lovely than anything she showed the public. I always thought of her as a visitor from another world, a traveler stranded here who’d come from a distant star that burned out long ago. I always felt it was my job to try to protect her.”
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