Gloria Guinness

Through her maternal family, Gloria was a niece of Gaspar Rubio de Tejada y Benavente (cousin of the celebrated 19th-century art collector Ramón de Errazu y Rubio de Tejada), and of Jesús Colón de Larreátegui y Vallarta (direct descendant of the 1st Duke of Veragua, eldest son of Christopher Columbus). Gloria had two elder siblings: Rafael and Maria Luisa.

The Guinnesses had an apartment in Manhattan's Waldorf Towers, an 18th-century farmhouse called Villa Zanroc in Epalinges near Lausanne, a 350-ton yacht, an apartment on Avenue Matignon in Paris, decorated by Georges Geffroy, a stud farm in Normandy, Haras de Piencourt, and Gemini, a mansion at Manalapan, Florida.

In 1980, Gloria Guinness died of a heart attack at Villa Zanroc in Epalinges. She is buried next to her last husband at the Bois de Vaux Cemetery in Lausanne, who was transferred there after his death in a health clinic in Houston, Texas, in 1988.

Gloria was named by Truman Capote as one of his "swans", a group which included Lee Radziwill, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Vanderbilt, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, and others, which he used as inspiration for his characters, most notably in his chapter "La Côte Basque 1965".

At an advanced age Guinness began to frequently write for Harper's Bazaar. She famously asserted, in the magazine's July 1963 issue, that "Elegance is in the brain as well as the body and in the soul. Jesus Christ is the only example we have of any one human having possessed all three at the same time."

Despite being voted in second place at Time magazine's "Best Dressed Woman In the World" in 1962, only after the then First Lady of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy, Eleanor Lambert famously asserted that without a doubt Gloria Guinness was "to me, the most elegant woman in the World".

She appeared on the International Best Dressed List from 1959 through 1963. The year after, she was elevated into its Hall of Fame.

Her fourth, and final, marriage was to Group Captain Thomas Loel Guinness (1906–1988), Member of Parliament, shareholder of Guinness Mahon, as a member of the banking branch of the Guinness family. They married on 7 April 1951, in Antibes. By this marriage, she had three stepchildren: Patrick Benjamin Guinness (1931–1965), married to her daughter Dolores; William Loel Seymour Guinness (born 1939), and Belinda Guinness (1941-2020), wife of 5th and last Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

Among the seventeen outfits, twelve hats and pairs of shoes that she donated were a 1948 Balenciaga evening gown of organdy with flock flowers, an evening gown from 1965, a 1949 hand-painted evening gown by Marcelle Chaumont and a 1950s evening gown by Jeanne Lafaurie, the only dress by that designer in the collection of Victoria & Albert Museum.

The Florida property, which is divided by U.S. Highway A1A, faces the lake on one side and the ocean on the other; the two halves of the building, which was designed in the 1940s by architect Marion Syms Wyeth for Gerald Lambert, were ingeniously connected by a sound-proofed living room that was set beneath the bisecting road. In addition, the Guinnesses built a house in Acapulco, Mexico, designed by Mexican architect Marco Aldaco. They also kept three aircraft: an Avro Commander for short trips around Europe, a small jet, and a helicopter for Loel Guinness's hops between the Manalapan house and the Palm Beach golf course.

Her second marriage was to Franz-Egon Maria Meinhard Engelbert Pius Aloysius Kaspar Ferdinand Dietrich, third Graf von Fürstenberg-Herdringen (1896–1975), whom she married on 4 October 1935, in Kensington, London, England; this being the second marriage to both and making her a stepmother of actress Betsy von Furstenberg. They were the parents of:

Her first marriage, to Jacobus Hendrik Franciscus Scholtens, the Dutch director of a sugar refinery estate in Veracruz took place in Mexico City on 31 March 1933. Rubio was 20, and the groom, a son of Jan Scholtens and Maria Le Comte, was 47. They separated shortly afterwards and finally divorced in 1935 (with no issue).

Her third marriage was to Ahmad-Abu-El-Fotouh Fakhry Bey (1921–1998), whom she married in 1946 and divorced in 1949. He was a grandson of King Fuad I of Egypt, as the only child of Princess Fawkia of Egypt, Countess Wladimir d’Adix-Dellmensingen, and her first husband, Mahmud Fakhry Pasha. Through his mother he was a nephew of King Farouk I of Egypt and Queen Fawzia of Irant (first wife of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran). (No issue came form this marriage).

Gloria Guinness previously Gloria von Fürstenberg, née Rubio y Alatorre (27 August 1912 – 9 November 1980) was a Mexican socialite and fashion and cultural icon, as well as a contributing editor to Harper's Bazaar from 1963 to 1971, considered to be one of the most elegant women of all time. She was portrayed by Cecil Beaton, Slim Aarons, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, etc., designed for by Cristóbal Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli, Hubert de Givenchy, Yves Saint-Laurent amongst others, as well as a close friend and inspiration to Truman Capote.

Gloria Rubio y Alatorre was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. She was the daughter of José Rafael Rubio y Torres (1880, Michoacán, México – 1917, San Antonio, Texas), a liberal journalist who supported Francisco I. Madero for which he died in exile in the United States, and his wife Maria Luisa Alatorre de la Cueva y Diaz-Ocampo (b. 1882, Zapotlán el Grande, Jalisco), who belonged to a Spanish colonial landowning family from Jalisco who made their fortune in sugar (descendants of conquistador Don Diego de Ochoa-Garibay), partly described by their relative, five times Nobel Prize nominee, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa, in his book Parentalia.