Fall
2000
Volume 94,
Number 1
C L O S E - U P
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Still in Vogue 
inset, Messinesi today. |
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| 29The
day Despina Plakias Messinesi ’29 was supposed to start her $25-a-week
job at Vogue in New York, she begged off. “I’m taking a
donkey to the Ritz for breakfast,” she explained, and so she
was. The year was 1941, and Messinesi had fled war-darkened Athens for her native United States, where she had thrown herself into Greek war relief. On this occasion, to call attention to the relief effort, she had managed to locate several donkeys to drape with baskets of flowers and parade through the streets. When she arrived at Vogue the next day, she was surprised that everybody already seemed to know her. They showed her why: a half-page photo in the morning paper of Messinesi hugging a donkey. “Depy” Messinesi went on to become a legendary figure at Vogue, working there into her 80s. Born in Brookline, Mass., to Greek immigrant parents, she had gone to Greece at 3, returned at 5, and then moved to Paris. When she was 11, her father drowned. Returning to Brookline, the family struggled to make ends meet. As an adolescent, Messinesi taught French for $2 an hour. Her mother took in a boarder, a dance instructor who taught at Abbot. Encouraged by that teacher, Messinesi entered Abbot as a scholarship student, graduating three years later with what she calls “the only education I’ve ever had.” Abbot steadied her compass in an uncertain world. “It kept me stable,” she says, “and I am grateful.” She particularly remembers “Miss Bailey”—Principal Bertha Bailey—as “a grand woman” who spoke softly and managed to both inspire and comfort. Messinesi gave up dreams of college to nurse her mother, severely injured in a car crash. Later, visiting her grandmother in Greece, she met the man she would marry, and did so, at 20, in 1931. Her husband, Milto, was in the import-export business, and they lived in Athens. “The 30s were a happy time for us,” she recalls. As a young society matron she hobnobbed with the rich and powerful. But the German invasion ended it all, and the war would doom her marriage. She soon found herself alone and practically penniless in New York. By the time she went looking for work at Vogue her larder was down to coffee and dry toast. But she landed on her feet. She had a gift for writing. She was observant and adventurous. Fluent in English, Greek, French and German, she moved easily in society and had a wide circle of prominent friends. At Vogue, where she worked for 52 years, she served as a fashion editor and as head of the magazine’s Paris office in the years following World War II, when designers like Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli were transforming the fashion world. Messinesi was a friend of them all. After her Paris assignment, she began circling the world as Vogue’s travel editor. As Americans started to take to the skies, Messinesi went ahead, sending back the flavor of far-flung places, advice on things to see, where to stay and what to eat, and travel tips laced with humor and good sense. She cites “curiosity” as the greatest asset in furthering her career—that and the fact that, when it came to assignments, she always said yes. Today, at 89, she divides her time between her New York apartment and a home upstate. She indulges herself by “procrastinating” and doing what she likes. “All your life you’ve been giving,” she explains. “Now it’s time to give to yourself.” Her dark eyes glow. “I’ve had a wonderful life. That’s all I can tell you.” —Deborah
Fitts ’63
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