Elsa Klensch, who was among the first to bring fashion to television screens with CNN’s “Style with Elsa Klensch” in the 1980s, has died aged 92 in New York City, CNN has confirmed.
For two decades, she gave CNN viewers a front row seat on runways around the world, including New York, Milan and Paris.
“There’s nothing as exciting as a good collection. I can walk in like a lot of other fashion editors — tired, depressed, fed up,” Klensch said on her 2000 show The World is Changing. .”
Klensch was born in Sydney, Australia. She studied journalism at the University of Sydney and started her career in London in the 1960s, but her reporting took her to several places, including Papua New Guinea and Hong Kong, where she worked. as a freelance writer for Women’s Wear Daily. In the 1970s, Klensch worked as a fashion editor and reported for WWD, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in New York.
She joined the Cable News Network in 1980, hosting and producing “Style with Else Klensch” until 2001. Klensch’s weekly reports covering the global fashion industry, in which she brought designers in front of the camera, have developed a devoted following and made him show one of the most watched networks in the 1980s.
“When we started, maybe for the first five years, we were the only TV crew (at fashion shows),” Klensch said on his show in 2000. “The designers really didn’t understand the concept of television.”
When Klensch arrived at the fashion shows, everyone knew, said Walter Imparato, her photojournalist for more than a decade. Many designers expected her to interview them behind the scenes of their work.
“We rolled, we were like a rock band,” Imparato, now a senior photojournalist at CNN, told CNN. “The photographers waited for hours and we exploded.”
Industry icons and ordinary households watched his show, and it became one of the highest-rated shows on CNN’s weekend lineup.
Klensch met her husband, Charles Klensch, then Saigon bureau chief for ABC News, in the 1960s. They were married in Saigon during the Vietnam War.
