Free Love And Fashion

Liberation was in the air when Tony Mazzola took the helm of Bazaar in 1972. His two-decade reign would see the birth of feminism, the rise of celebrity culture, and the return of American glamour.

- Stephen Mooallem

BY THE TIME Anthony T. Mazzola was named editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar in 1972, the magazine was already wrestling with a major sociological shift. “Liberation” was the catchword to describe the impact of feminism, but the conversations that surrounded the issues of marriage, careers, and motherhood were changing in ways that the magazine had only just begun to address. With the war in Vietnam and the country heading for an economic recession, there was a strong sense of the present in fashion. In November 1973, at the beginning of Mazzola’s second year at Bazaar, upstart American designers duked it out with French heavyweights at the Battle of Versailles, a charity fashion show held to raise money for the palace’s restoration. And women like Lauren Hutton and Ali MacGraw were defining a new wave of free-spirited, effortless American style.

As an editor, the New Jersey–born Mazzola was a polymath, with well-cultivated tastes in art and photography. He’d worked as a commercial artist while attending night school at Cooper Union in Manhattan. After being drafted into the Army, he served in military intelligence throughout World War II while stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines, earning a Bronze Star. He later returned to New York, and in 1948, at the age of 25, was hired to be the art director at Hearst’s Town & Country by the magazine’s editor, Henry Sell, who had edited Bazaar in the 1920s.

Mazzola became the editor of Town & Country in 1965 and, over the next several years, funneled his curiosities into the magazine. Town & Country became a lively paean to old money, high society, Hollywood, haute fashion, lavish living, and modern art, and it teemed with stellar photography, publishing the work of Richard Avedon, Jerry Schatzberg, and Mazzola’s friend Slim Aarons, among others.