Anne Trehearne

Fashion Editor of 'Queen'

Anne Trehearne, fashion editor and consultant: born Croydon, Surrey 22 June 1925; died London 2 July 2006.

Anne Trehearne was part of the iconic group who in the Fifties, under Jocelyn Stevens, transformed the slightly dowdy magazine The Queen into a trendy style leader. In the Sixties she helped shape a new television look when Diana Rigg joined the cast of The Avengers.

Trehearne had joined The Queen in 1948 as fashion assistant when it was owned by Hector Caird, who ran it as a traditional society magazine on a tight budget. By the time Stevens bought the magazine in 1957, she had risen to Fashion Editor.

She quickly empathised with the new outlook brought in by Stevens and his team, which included Mark Boxer and Quentin Crewe. Encouraged by Stevens and Boxer, she appreciated the scope they offered her and became one of the first fashion editors to understand that style was as important as words.

Trehearne served Stevens twice in this role, leaving Queen in 1962 (Stevens had dropped the definite article) but returning in 1966 after the departure of her replacement Clare Rendlesham (when Stevens famously threw Rendlesham's suitcases through the office window).

Born in 1925, Anne Trehearne was the second daughter of Edward Scarlett Trehearne, a partner in a London law firm, and his wife Ellen. Educated at Roedean, she regarded her real education as having come from her time as an evacuee in Canada, where she stayed with friends in Government House, Halifax. On returning to England, she continued her work with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

Trehearne recognised that being a successful magazine fashion editor in the 1950s and 1960s no longer meant reporting the trends; photographers were becoming the new fashion élite and a fashion editor had to be able to interpret their ideas and work with them creatively. She did this brilliantly. Willie Landels, Queen's Art Editor from 1965 who five years later became the long-serving Editor of Harpers & Queen (absorbing Queen into the National Magazine Company title Harper's Bazaar), says, "Fashion to Annie was always fun. It suited her very visual talents and her unusual larky personality."

Leading photographers such as Norman Parkinson, Brian Duffy, Helmut Newton and Michel Molinari worked with Trehearne and together they produced memorable fashion pages. She was in many ways the original of today's often-credited fashion stylist - the person who works with the photographer by producing the right clothes and accessories and putting them together for visual effect.

In between stints at Queen, she worked for the advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce as a fashion consultant. She also worked for television and in 1965-66 was the stylist for the trend-setting series The Avengers, presiding over the design of the wardrobe for Diana Rigg, who arrived in October 1965 as Emma Peel, replacing Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) as the partner of John Steed (Patrick Macnee). In doing so, Trehearne helped invent a new sort of heroine - modern, sexy and provocative.

Her last job, after Jocelyn Stevens sold Queen in 1968, was to do the public relations for the Park Lane Hotel, where she worked closely with the managing director, Clive Carr, and helped him turn around the fortunes and image of the hotel.

Annie Trehearne had an iconoclastic, irreverent streak, which, combined with her special offbeat sense of humour, helped her to build relationships with the new breed of young creatives and photographers in the early Sixties. On being offered a job by the film director Franco Zeffirelli, Trehearne responded that she simply could not accept as she would never be able to get up in the morning. Amused, Zeffirelli responded by noting that she would "obviously" need an understudy - "Garbo perhaps?"

In reality, Trehearne's answer to the morning was to rely on her taxi service. Drivers would become devoted regulars and would arrive at her flat with all she required - cigarettes, food, etc. They would wait patiently whilst she got organised and would transport her and her pug to Queen's office in Fetter Lane.

Her eccentricities only endeared her to her friends. Willie Landels, who recalls her partiality for Coca-Cola with Worcester sauce, remembers how she insisted on travelling with her feet above her head - awkward on aeroplanes. Min Hogg, asked by her to tea once, found that her hostess had locked herself in and lost her key. Undaunted, she passed out a mug and poured the tea through the letter-box.

Joan Price