Elsa Klensch’s audience was the world as she charted changes in fashion

She may have been little known in her homeland, but Elsa Klensch was the biggest name in New York fashion for 40 years.

Elsa Klensch speaks to designer Yves Saint Laurent in the 1980s. icture: New York Post

Elsa Klensch. Fashion writer.
Born Switzerland, February 21, 1933 (but possibly 1930); died New York, March 4, aged 89 or 92.

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Elsa Klensch’s pale face framed by a signature glossy black bob was often copied, but once she found out it was a popular part of a Halloween costume she changed it. “It became a joke, not that I really mind,” she told a reporter in 2001, just as her television fashion show – CNN’s Style with Elsa Klensch – closed its final season. It had been broadcast across up to 200 stations worldwide since 1980, blazing a trail in fashion reporting.

Through it, Klensch became the most influential name in fashion in New York City for almost four decades, but the former Sydney journalist is hardly remembered in Australia.

Klensch kept her finger on the pulse of the business and brought a serious, informed voice to the reporting about new fabrics, new faces and emerging trends while always keeping an eye on the ups and downs of hemlines.

The first episode of her groundbreaking show pioneered the idea that fashion was lifestyle and included Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol and American dance legend Martha Graham.

Many Australians’ first encounter with Klensch was a memorable cameo performance in the 1994 film Pret-a-Porter (and for many men the film introduced that term, which means ready-to-wear – most of us never knew there was clothing that wasn’t). Kim Basinger starred in Pret-a-Porter – producer Robert Altman roughly based her character, Kitty Potter, around Klensch’s world. But Basinger’s character is an overly ambitious, out-of-her-depth writer bumbling her way through interviews with designers, unsure of herself and her subjects and who, during Paris Fashion Week, keeps encountering, and is overawed by, the real Klensch.

Many people were. But Klensch’s beginnings were modest. She migrated to Australia with her German parents before World War II and spent her early years in Cooranbong, south of Newcastle, whose most famous residents have been Michael and Lindy Chamberlain. Her father died when she was young and she moved with her mother to the Blue Mountains, taking her mother’s surname, Aeschbacher.

She won a spot at the Univer­sity of Sydney but left for a cadetship with The Daily Telegraph, then owned by Frank Packer. She always said she wanted to be a political reporter so as to be close to power. She wrote under the byline Elsa Barker, assuming her name beyond the grasp of colleagues and readers. By 1960 she was in London and on the soon-to-close afternoon daily The Star, which was known for its fashion reporting, and then the Sunday Express.

She returned to Australia on the maiden voyage of SS Canberra – later famous for its role in the Falklands War – reportedly negotiating to be its press officer in lieu of the fare. She stayed on board as it skipped around the Pacific and finally back to Sydney.

Ever adventurous, Klensch worked for a while at the ABC and then Papua New Guinea as a press officer for the Australian government before moving to Hong Kong, where she worked for a trade newspaper. There she bumped into another journalist, Charles Klensch, who ran the Saigon bureau of American TV network ABC. They married in Saigon in 1966 as the Vietnam War raged about the capital.

They moved to New York and it was there where she had her “Seventh Avenue” education on America’s fashion bible Women’s Wear Daily. She passed through other legendary mastheads including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New York Post. She was doing a TV slot when spotted by Ted Turner, who was on the cusp of launching the 24-hours news channel CNN. He hired her and a few months later she was presenting her first show and reshaping the world of fashion reporting.

The Australian’s fashion editor Glynis Traill-Nash says Klensch was truly a pioneer of fashion on television. “She spoke to her subject with deep knowledge and understanding, objectively explaining the latest trends to viewers, and interviewing designers with respect and intelligence for that much-desired insider’s view,” Traill-Nash says.

“The irony is that while she paved the way, no one has taken her place. Fashion shows may have proliferated since, but they are largely ‘fashiontainment’, grounded in judgmental and opinionated reality TV – Project Runway, model searches, Fashion Police – with even knowledgeable commentators on the subject reduced to walking sound bites and catchphrases.”

CNN’s research revealed the extraordinary global reach of Style with Elsa Klensch, including that 45 per cent of viewers were men. She never retired. “I’m so tied up with fashion and design, it almost seems impossible to live without it,” she said when CNN dropped her. “It has consumed my life.”