Published by Legacy
ALISO VIEJO, CALIF. — Pioneering fashion designer, art collector, philanthropist and community anchor, Gloria Manney passed away after a long illness in Aliso Viejo, Calif., on December 31, 2024, at the age of 90.
Gloria was born in 1934 in New York City. She attended Miami Beach High School and the University of Florida, Gainesville. Taking after her athletic parents, she was a high school varsity athlete in several sports, as well as a majorette. At the University of Florida, she planned on continuing her sporting prowess, but with few outlets available before Title IX, instead focused on her art major.
As a small child, she contracted rheumatic fever and her family moved from NYC to Miami Beach, Fla., for the healthier weather and her mother Florence’s quick divorce. Hospitalized for months at a time, nurses and doctors tried to keep her interested in the world. She wanted to dress her dolls, so the medical staff took old cotton surgical drapes, surgical needles and thread to teach her basic stitches. Soon she was making clothing for all her dolls. She continued making her own fashion-forward outfits through high school.
Descended from a long line of tailors, clothing retailers and clothes horses, after college Gloria worked for Louis Reinstein’s Miami Beach leather and knitwear company, Jo-Ro Imports. First employed as a salesgirl with exquisite taste, she quickly rose to in-house designer and excelled in beaded and sequined sweaters and dresses for the public. She reimagined American knitwear forever, from utilitarian handknits to exquisite formalwear. Gloria’s timeless and intricate designs were sold under Jo-Ro’s label, as well as most major US department store and boutique labels, and at every price point. Her pieces were owned by everyone from Elizabeth Taylor, Jayne Mansfield, Marlene Dietrich and pageant queens to the average American. Many of her knitwear designs and innovations were copied by others for years. You can still find her pieces in vintage stores around the world.
In 1963, she married Richard Manney. They met on a blind date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which would figure in their lives in an unexpectedly large fashion.
Gloria gave birth to their daughter, Patricia, in 1964 and stopped working in fashion, although she had a brief cottage business with her friend Rusty turning workmen’s lunchboxes into neo-Victorian decoupaged handbags for Saks Fifth Avenue while Patricia was a baby.
Moving to Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1969, Gloria threw herself into the village’s civic life. She decorated parade floats, served on village committees and helped raise money to save prized Tiffany windows on a church. She was a benefactor to the Irvington public schools, supplying them with endless food and treats for students and staff alike, industrial fans to cool the students and proctors taking end-of-year exams in the hot gymnasium, and costume designing school productions, including escorting the students to the famous costume rental houses for Broadway, so they could wear the actual costumes worn by the Broadway performers who created the roles before them for inspiration.
Gloria collected things from childhood whenever she saw something special and felt it needed a loving home. As a magpie-meets-pack rat, her collections ran from the finest objects and art in the world, to trinkets most people would pass by as insignificant. She was famed as a “divvy,” someone drawn across a room directly to an object, knowing nothing about its origin, yet would instantly feel its rarity, importance and vibration. “How did you know?” was a comment made by dealers and curators throughout her life. She was a high/low collector before there was such a term and combined them in her home and on her person with outrageous wit and style. In the mid-60s, she visited the local upholstery shop and saw a Victorian carved chair in the window. Struck by its design and workmanship, she bought it and carried it a block home. Richard said, “Well, if you want to live with old furniture.” She replied, “I wonder who made it?” Their lives would never be the same.
Along with Richard, they created definitive collections of art, antiques and books, working with curators to advance knowledge in any area they collected by helping write seminal texts and assemble museum shows on American portrait miniatures, the furniture of John Henry Belter and American Federal furniture. Their most famous collections are housed at museums around the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. All that started with taking their dinners on trays and climbing under furniture with a flashlight to study Nineteenth Century joinery.
She reentered the business world to help her husband and his advertising agency, The Mediators, Inc., overseeing hiring and their art collections, and brainstorming innovative media buying and barter deals. Gloria was famed for her life advice and aspirational counsel.
Gloria’s honors include: benefactor in perpetuity and William Cullen Bryant fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; member of the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution; and a Knight of Malta.
As trustee members of the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art cultural travel group, and with their company as the media buyer for many foreign governments’ tourism departments, Richard and Gloria travelled the world and were often early visitors to previously off-limits places, whether they were part of the first American cultural group in post-Mao-meets-Nixon China, seeing art behind the Iron Curtain or the first outsiders allowed on an island after a volcanic eruption.
A lifetime of ill health caught up with her in the 1990s, and along with her husband’s early onset dementia, her life became smaller.
Her beloved Richard passed away in July 2024, after 61 years of marriage.
Gloria leaves behind her daughter and son-in-law, Patricia (PJ) Manney and Eric Gruendemann and her grandchildren, Nate Gruendemann and his wife Allie Schlosser and Hannah Gruendemann, as well as cousins. Nate inherited his Nana’s love of athletics, entrepreneurship, art and architecture. Hannah inherited Nana’s love of art, skill with paints and her bohemian aesthetic and style. Both inherited Gloria’s belief in living life your own way and helping others. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation in Gloria’s name to the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association or your local museum or cultural institution.
