Lucie Noel (1899–1972)

Elizabeth Lucie Léon was born in Moscow. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, she emigrated to France. During World War II, her husband Paul Léon was killed by the Nazis. The couple were close friends of writer James Joyce and his family and Paul had also served as his business advisor. She adopted the name Lucie Noël and became the fashion reporter and later fashion editor of the New York Herald Tribune's Paris bureau. In 1956, she was naturalized as an American citizen. The New York Times reported in 2006: In 1958, in a time when everything seemed light, Art Buchwald wrote an editorial in The New York Herald Tribune decrying the decision by the couturier Cristobal Balenciaga to ban the paper's fashion editor, Lucie Noel, from his showings. "Mme. Noel has been covering the collections in Paris for the last 22 years," Mr. Buchwald wrote. "She was always the first one to jump out of her gilt-edged chair and shout 'Arriba Balenciaga!' How could this happen?" Mr. Buchwald went on to say that the survival of Western civilization depended on Mme. Noel's reports.