Ernestine Carter

Ernestine Marie Fantl was born on 10 October 1906 in Savannah, Georgia, US, where she was brought up.[2] She studied modern and contemporary art and design at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1927.[2] She started out as a curatorial assistant at the newly formed Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City in 1932, and held the title Curator between 1935 and 1937.[2][3] As Ernestine M. Fantl, she curated these exhibitions at MOMA:

• 1935: Contemporary Architecture in California
• 1935: The Recent Work of Le Corbusier
• 1936: Posters by Cassandre
• 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art
• 1936: Architecture in Government Housing
• 1936: Exposition Architecture
• 1937: Modern Architecture in England

In 1936 she married a British antiquarian book dealer, John Waynflete Carter (1905-1975), and the Carters eventually moved to London.[2]

During the Second World War Carter was employed by the British Ministry of Information.[3] She worked on exhibitions and edited a book of photographs by Lee Miller titled Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (published London, 1941).[4] The book, which included a foreword by Edward R. Murrow, went into five printings. Later in the war, Carter went to work for the U.S. office of war information in London.[2]

Carter worked on the important design exhibition Britain Can Make It, organised by the Council of Industrial Design and held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946.[2] That same year she became fashion editor for Harper's Bazaar.[5] Her first trip to Paris for the magazine was to report on Christian Dior's landmark New Look collection, launched 12 February 1947.[2][6] From 1952-54, she wrote her first newspaper column, a cookery section for The Observer, during which time she published a cookbook called Flash In The Pan (1953).[2]

In 1955, Carter began editing the women's page of The Sunday Times.[5] She became well known for the high standard of her journalism and writing, and eventually became associate editor of the paper in 1968.[2] Carter's editorial team, including Moira Keenan, was credited with having changed the face of fashion reporting in newspapers, presenting articles that emphasised excellence of design at all price levels.[7] Carter encouraged the emergence of London as a major centre of fashion in the 1960s.[2] Her intelligent prose and high standards led to her being recognised as an authoritative figure in the world of fashion.[2] At a time when widespread intellectual snobbery led to the dismissal of fashion as a subject not worthy of serious consideration, Carter argued that fashion was "surely no more frivolous than architecture, to which it is closely related".[2][8]

In 1962, Carter was appointed to the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design, a post awarded by the Minister of Education.[9] She was appointed an OBE in 1964.[10] In the same year, she became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.[11]

In 1966, she was the first individual fashion journalist to be invited to select an outfit for the Dress Of The Year, for which she chose a futuristic PVC and linen ensemble by Michèle Rosier, Young Jaeger and Simone Mirman.[12] Two years later, she was appointed associate editor of The Sunday Times, a role she held until her retirement from the paper in 1972.[1]

The Fashion Museum, Bath holds an important archive of more than 2000 fashion photographs from The Sunday Times during Carter's tenure there.[13] This is known both as the Ernestine Carter Collection and as The Sunday Times Fashion Archive.[14] The Fashion Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum both own garments from Carter's wardrobe.[2][15]