Solange d'Ayen

Early life Solange Marie Christine Louise de Labriffe was born in Amiens, in northern France, on 5 April 1898. She had an older sister, Marie de Labriffe (1893–1985).

Career In the late 1920s, Solange started working as a fashion consultant and later became the fashion editor She also wrote for American Vogue. Irish journalist Carmel Snow, who was working for Vogue at that time, said of Solange: "she was the person I most wanted at that time to fashion myself on".

She worked as a fashion editor of French Vogue until the 1940s.

In 1951, she became an editor of magazine.

Towards the end of her life, she was known as Solange de Labriffe. and had two children; a daughter, Geneviève Hélène Anne Marie Yolande de Noailles (1921–1998), and a son, Adrien Maurice Edmond Marie Camille de Noailles (1925–1944), a soldier who died in Rupt-sur-Moselle during World War II at the age of 19.

She was a close friend of several artists such as French fashion designer Coco Chanel, Swiss fashion designer Robert Piguet, French painter Christian Bérard,

Imprisonment during World War II Her husband, Jean de Noailles, was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and was arrested by the Gestapo on 22 January 1942, as a result of an anonymous denunciation. He died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 14 April 1945, In 1952, the Paris military court sentenced Suzanne Provost, a Gestapo collaborator accused of having denounced Jean de Noailles, to 20 years of imprisonment. Knochen was sentenced to death by a Parisian military tribunal in 1954, but was later pardoned by President de Gaulle and released in 1962.

French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, who had met Solange while he was working as an apprentice of Robert Piguet, described her as a "great beauty", who had "classic taste", and said that she always wore black because she had lost her husband and son in the war.

In popular culture In 1939, French composer Francis Poulenc dedicated his song "Fleurs" to Solange.

In 2023, Solange was portrayed by French actress Marion Cotillard in the Lee Miller biopic Lee, directed by American filmmaker Ellen Kuras.