Ruth Ansel, one of the greatest magazine designers ever

Text by Annina Rabe, written for Sidbloggen.

For over 50 years, Ruth Ansel has worked as an art director for a number of influential magazines and she is, on the whole, an unbelievably cool person. In the sixties she did Harper’s Bazaar, in the seventies she did New York Times Magazine, and in the eighties she left her own special mark of elegance and contemporary sense on Vanity Fair, in connection with the magazine being reawakened after lying dormant for 50 years.

Magazine nerds like myself still remember, for example, the awfully good-looking spread in which a naked Whoopi Goldberg lies in a bath-tub filled with milk, or the Madonna cover which marked the superstar’s metamorphosis into a Marilyn Monroe-like blonde in the beginning of the eighties.

Since the nineties, Ruth Ansel runs her own design studio, and though she today is over 70 years old she is still active. She has worked with just about everybody; Diana Vreeland, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibowitz, Bruce Weber and Tina Brown, just to mention a few.

Not least the fact that she is a woman in a business extremely dominated by men has made her a role model for many younger designers. In an interview in 2005, she herself noticed drily that the opportunities for women in her business scarcely hasn’t changed at all over the years. “More women are seen in the offices, but they still don’t get the same recognition and the same pay as their male counterparts. We are still working in a world dominated by men. You might be exceptionally talented, but it is still hard to get a top position as a graphic designer, architect or interior designer”.

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