Edie Locke (3 August 1921 - 23 August 2020) was an Austrian-American magazine editor and television producer and presenter. She was editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle from 1971 through 1979.
Edith Rosenberg Laub was born in Vienna on 3 August 1921 to Dora Hochburg Laub and Herman Laub, who was a department store buyer.[1] She had one younger brother who died as an infant.[1] In 1938, when Hitler invaded Vienna, she and other Jewish students were expelled from her school and her father was fired.[1][2] Locke was in 1939 able to obtain a US visa and fled, first by train to Cherbourg, then on the Aquitania to New York; her parents were unable to obtain U.S. visas and fled to England.[1][2] Locke lived in Brooklyn, where the family had relatives who took her in, worked in a toothpaste factory, and took courses at Brooklyn College, including English lessons, as she had immigrated speaking no English.[1][2]
Locke got a job as a secretary at Harper's Bazaar, a monthly women's magazine.[1] She became an assistant editor at Junior Bazaar.[1] She wrote a monthly newsletter about fashion for an advertising agency, which was read by Mademoiselle's editor-in-chief Betsey Blackwell, who hired Locke in the early 1950s as an associate fashion editor.[1][3] In 1971 Blackwell retired and Locke became the magazine's editor-in-chief.[1][3] She was fired in 1979 by Alexander Liberman, then editorial director of Conde Nast, because he wanted a "lighter and sexier" magazine, similar to competitor Cosmopolitan, than the issues-heavy version Locke was producing.[1][2] During her time at Mademoiselle she worked with and mentored multiple fashion designers.[1] Proteges she mentored when they were launching their careers included Betsey Johnson, Donna Karan, and Ralph Lauren.[1][2][4]
Locke hosted and produced You! Magazine for USA Network starting in 1981 and later a regular fashion segment for Attitudes, a daily lifestyle show on Lifetime.[1][2]
The Christian Science Monitor in 1986 said she had "helped shape the way a whole generation looked and imagined themselves."[5] In 2016 the Courtauld Institute of Art included her in Documenting Fashion, a series of oral history interviews about the fashion industry.[1][6]
Locke met Ralph Locke in the early 1960s on a trip to St. Croix, where he was the manager of the Buccaneer Hotel, and they married in 1963.[2] The couple had a daughter and grandchildren.[1] From 1994, she lived in Los Angeles.[1] She died on 23 August 2020, at her home in Thousand Oaks.[1][7]
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