Elsa Klensch, who was a pioneer in bringing bringing fashion to TV screens with her show, “Style with Elsa Klensch,” died Friday at the age of 92 in New York City.
Her show, which was an institution on CNN from 1980 to 2001, featured weekly reports covering the global fashion industry and put designer, such as Miuccia Prada, Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld on TV screens. For two decades, Klensch provided video coverage of the runways in New York, London, Milan and Paris and during that time, few had the reach or viewership that she built up over the years. At that time, CNN was delivered to more than 200 million households and it became one of the highest-rated shows of CNN’s weekend programming.
Klensch was born in Sydney, Australia, and studied journalism at the University of Sydney. She began her career in London in the ’60s, and over the years worked for WWD, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in New York. She joined the Cable News Network in 1980, and hosted and produced “Style with Elsa Klensch” until 2001, which was dedicated solely to fashion news and put fashion trends into context for a mainstream audience. For the first five years, she was the only TV crew at the fashion shows, which completely changed in later years.
In an interview with WWD in 2000, Klensch discussed her frenzied schedule, pointing out that she had done five stories every week for 20 years. She said the best part of her job was the designer interviews, and she had interviewed them all from Azzedine Alaia to Yohji Yamamoto.
Klensch managed to wrangle interviews with Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Martha Graham and Halston for her very first program, and broadcast a Halston runway show. However, she recalled that in the beginning, bringing a bunch of bulky cameras to the show was a tough sell.
“I had to argue about getting space for the crew,” she recalled in the 2000 interview. “We used to have to take up room where the buyers were sitting at the end of the runway. And asking someone to move four chairs was a bit difficult. I was quite well known, but a lot of designers just didn’t understand what I was doing.”
Klensch’s tapes are on view at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
When she stepped down from CNN, she told WWD in 2001, “I can confirm I have been asked to leave the network. I want to spend less time traveling, and have more time with my husband [Charles Klensch] and friends….I’m interested in new opportunities.”
In 1987, Klensch was awarded by the Council of Fashion Designers of America for “consistently bringing international fashion to the largest audience in the history of television,” and for consistently “getting the story first and getting it right.” In 1999, she received a second CFDA Award for “career achievement in fashion journalism.”
After leaving CNN in early 2001, Klensch started writing again and created a monthly jewelry column for Gem.net and wrote articles for Elle Decor, House Beautiful, and Architectural Digest. She also began writing novels in a deal with Forge Books, a division of the Holzbrinck Publishing Group, who signed her to write a series of four mystery novels featuring TV news producer Sonya Iverson as amateur sleuth. Her first one, “Live at 10:00, Dead at 10:15,” was published in 2004, followed by “Shooting Script” in 2005, “Take Two,” in 2007, and “The Third Sin,” in 2014.
“I can’t say every character is a touch of somebody on Seventh Avenue, but they are blends of characters,” Klensch told WWD in 2004.
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