Lee Radziwill was once a Giorgio Armani PR exec

Giorgio Armani is due to touch down in Australia for the first time tomorrow, so this little fashion history tidbit might be of interest to some of our readers.

Did you know, Lee Radziwill, a New York socialite (perhaps best known for being Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ younger sister), was once a public relations executive for Giorgio Armani?

Radziwill worked at Armani for eight years, working as the director of special events, leaving her post mid 1994 but kept ties with the company by doing the occasional consulting gig. She told Larry King in an interview that her job was to be the “eyes and ears of saying what people want here, and what they really don’t need there. And that was very interesting and a lot of fun.”

“She asked to leave in order to pursue other interests,”‘ said Linda Gaunt, the company’s director of public relations at the time.

It’s also interesting to note that in 1958, she also worked for Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar.

“And she was such a nice person too,” Radziwill says. “But she was such an original. Whatever she said was really different than the way anybody else would put it. But it was always right on. And then, I loved working at the Brussels Worlds Fair because I was in charge of the whole American fashion show there. And then I liked Giorgio Armani enormously. So it’s very difficult for me to say one was better than the other. They were really interesting.”

[Sourced via NY Times archives, CNN transcripts and Wikipedia]