Fashion journalist Sandra Graham, who is remembered in the memorial service

On Sunday there will be a memorial service for fashion journalist Sandra Graham in the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

Graham. 83, died of leukemia and endocrine cancer on May 14th in the Calvary Hospice Center in New York City, according to her daughter Rebecca Cox. Born in Montgomery, W.Va., grew up in Michigan. For 20 years she has been working in this capacity in the osteopathic hospital in Riverside in Trenton, Michigan, as the mother of four children, Graham, as an enthusiastic reader of the New Yorker as well as Vogue and Cosmopolitan, had a longing for the first time.

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She changed career tracks, worked with small boutiques to Michigan and traveled to New York, California and Texas to buy trips. Graham has also teamed up with hairdressers and mask images to appear on local cable shows in the 1970s and 1980s. The entrepreneurial Graham offered to work with women in their houses, and also organized shopping events for gift summits that were aimed at men for Valentine’s Day and other important holidays. After all, this experience would be the catalyst to create Graham communication.

After divorcing Darrell Graham in the 1970s, Graham later moved to New York City to continue to fashion, where she stayed for more than 40 years.

Cox said: “It was as if she had two lives – and everyone was lived to the fullest. One was in Michigan with the family, the children and the job of breathing therapy. She was even promoted to the lung functionalist to work with an innovative new machine. And she had her life in New York.”

Her New York career began in the Charivari Directorate specialty business, in which other fashion talents such as Marc Jacobs have worked at the cash register. After a run at the Jewelry Company Krementz & Co. in the 1980s, she moved to Halston in his Randolph Duke years. Later in Posts at Vivienne Tam and Reem Acra, she became the forerunner of celebrity dressing by connecting to Tina Knowles to dress her daughter Beyoncé Knowles Carter and Kelly Rowland from Destiny’s Child at a time when only a few PR directors gave black celebrities their due respect.

Graham also had a hand in the profit of the actress Minnie Driver, who won the Oscars, and Taraji P. Hensons Oscars look from 2006. “In the nineties, Sandy was at the top of an extremely critical component of the fashion machine that is the work between the stylist, the celebrity and the PR person. White, a award -winning fashion journalist. “Sandy has created these invaluable relationships with stylists who have worked a lot behind the scenes.”

At the same time, big designers such as Versace, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and other large brands were on the rise. Phillip Bloch, Jessica Paster, Elizabeth Saltzman and Arianne Phillips were some of the stylists they were connected, said White. “At that time there was this very sensitive dance that she did so well when she represented independent designers who competed against these large brands with a large wallet.

In 2010, Graham made the jewelry, which has a diamond chain of $ 1 million for the wedding of the Olympic gold medalist Sanya Richards’ wedding with the Super Bowl winner Aaron Ross. For her own clothes, it was known that Graham bought in vintage shops to “wear the most funniest, strangest things” to see how strangers reacted to get a feeling for what fascinated people, said Cox. Another example of this ingenuity resulted from the need. As a stylist for a fashion show at Harrods in London, who campaigned for the size of the sizes and had the support of Princess Diana before her death, Graham and the team were asked to continue the project by the brother of the royal brother Charles Spencer after her killing. COX said: “My mother had come together all these clothes without realizing that the show was for larger women and not for the smaller women she worked with. To improvise, she finally got scarves, curtains and fabrics to pull everything off. She was very good at the last minute so that people could wear it with confidence to sell it.

Although no stars were intimidated by Graham, there was an exception, her daughter said. When she worked in Halston at Randolph Duke, she was a little restless during a breakfast with John F. Kennedy Jr., which was held in memory of his mother Jackie Onassis, who was wearing a hat designed by Roy Halston against the inauguration of 1961. At the beginning of the nineties, she headed public relations and sales at Halston.

Graham felt very comfortable to change her own look. Cox said that she sometimes approached the wrong woman at airports and incorrectly thought she was her mother. “There was the geometric perm and then the red hair and then the blonde hair. She tried everything and she loved it every minute,” said Cox. “She was not afraid to try something new to see what kind of reaction she would get. And she had a great personality to go hand in hand.”

Graham’s panache for trends of the red carpet never subsided, nor did her purely black clothing order changed, her daughter said. “She would criticize the Oscars. Even when she was shortly before death and was disoriented, she spoke of designing clothes that she would wear and reorganized the room.

Graham often gathered friends in her New York apartment for long conversations over a glass, a wine or a meal. The walls were covered with art – from which she fell away from the flea markets, said Cox.

Graham orchestrated the plans for her memorial service, which will take place in the same church, where she met her second husband Arthur Caliandro when she sang in the gospel choir. Cox said: “She chose the music and the pictures very carefully. I don’t want to change anything.”

Graham died by Caliandro and her parents Michael Thomas and Anna Ruth Johnson and her sister Jane Sherberg. In addition to Cox, Graham is survived by her daughters Catherine Milot and Jayne Michellle Gorham, her son Matthew Graham and her brother James Michael Johnson.

Instead of flowers, Graham’s family inquiries for donations to donations to the gray -free organization of the Marble Collegiate Church.

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