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Before Jane Birkin, There Was Babe Paley
- Diana True Knox
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
You know this story: Jane Birkin, on a plane, complaining that she couldn’t find a bag that worked for her life. Jean-Louis Dumas, sitting next to her, sketching a solution on the back of an airplane sick bag. Hermès names it after her. It becomes the most coveted object in fashion.
It’s a great story. It’s also not the first time this happened.
About twenty years earlier, a woman named Barbara “Babe” Paley tied an Hermès scarf around the handle of her handbag - not as a style statement, but because she was on her way to lunch and didn’t know what else to do with it. She was photographed. The photo ran. Within weeks, women everywhere were doing the same thing. We still do it today, whether we know her name or not.
Worth saying upfront: unlike the Birkin story, which has a documented date, a named executive, and a paper trail, the Babe Paley scarf story is something closer to fashion folklore - repeated for decades across style writing and never (as far as I could find) pinned to an exact date or an original photo credit. It’s real, it’s widely corroborated, and it’s almost certainly true. It’s just not “verified with a receipt” true in the way the Birkin origin is. I’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
And honestly? The scarf trick is the least interesting thing about her.
The Vogue Editor Who Got There at 23
Babe Paley was born Barbara Cushing in 1915, the youngest of three sisters so famous in their own right that society pages called them “the Fabulous Cushing Sisters.” Her father was Harvey Cushing - the man generally credited as the founder of modern neurosurgery. Before Cushing began operating, brain surgery was something close to a death sentence; mortality estimates from that era range widely across sources, from roughly 30–50% up to nearly 90–100% depending on the procedure and the surgeon. By the time Cushing’s career wound down, he’d brought his own mortality rate for tumor operations down into the single digits - a genuinely staggering shift, even accounting for how much the exact numbers vary by source.
Babe landed a job as a fashion editor at Vogue in 1938, at 23 years old. She held the position through the early 1940s, which meant she was covering fashion through the Second World War - writing about how American women dressed when the government controlled fabric allocation and rationing shaped what could even be manufactured. It’s not a glamorous footnote; it’s a genuinely under-covered piece of fashion history. Vogue sent her and photographer Toni Frissell as far as Charleston, South Carolina, to shoot a story at the Heyward-Washington House, a National Historic Landmark on Church Street - Babe playing at Southern belle for the magazine’s pages.
In 1941, Time magazine ranked her the second-best-dressed woman in the world. Number one was Wallis Simpson - the woman Edward VIII gave up the British throne to marry. That’s the company Babe Paley was keeping in her twenties.
The Original High-Low Dresser
Babe’s actual approach to clothing is what should get her cited in every “how to dress” piece that currently credits some 2020s influencer with “inventing” high-low mixing. She would buy entire couture collections outright from Balenciaga and Givenchy — not a piece here and there, the whole collection — and then wear it with drugstore costume jewelry and a scarf that cost four dollars. She went gray before any other woman in her social circle dared to stop dyeing. She made the pantsuit — a genuinely radical choice for a woman of her era and standing — into something aspirational rather than masculine-coded.
Oscar de la Renta, who knew her personally, said it plainly: whatever she wore, she wore in a way you’d never forget.
The Betrayal
Here’s the part of the story that turns dark.
Truman Capote was, by most accounts of the era, one of the most dangerous men in New York society - not because he was cruel in any obvious way, but because he collected secrets the way other people collect friends. He called his inner circle of society women “the Swans,” and Babe Paley was the one he was most obsessed with. He once said she only had to put on a pair of gloves and walk across a room to establish a new fashion.
She trusted him with everything - her marriage, her loneliness, her husband’s infidelities. And in 1975, Capote published an excerpt of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers in Esquire - a piece called “La Côte Basque, 1975” - that thinly fictionalized the private lives of the women who’d confided in him. Her name was technically changed. Nobody who knew the story missed who he meant. She never spoke to him again.
The Ending She Wrote Herself
Babe Paley was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974. She responded to the diagnosis the way she’d approached everything else in her life: with total control over the details. She planned her own funeral — the menu, the wine, which piece of jewelry went to which friend — and organized it all in a color-coded filing system, wrapped in colored paper.
She died on July 6, 1978 - one day after her 63rd birthday. Truman Capote was not invited to the funeral.
She made the international best-dressed list fourteen times over her lifetime before, eventually, asking to be taken off it - so that someone else could have the chance she’d already had.
I think that’s the detail that tells you who she actually was.
