Dianne Benson

Dianne Benson’s dual career as fashion retailer and designer were interchangeable – her artistic approach and cultural intentions governed her stores, her collections and her life. With her clothes, she transformed downtown artists into textile designers and outfitted forward-thinkers such as Philip Glass and his ensemble. In her stores, she pioneered the marriage of fashion, architecture and art that we take for granted today.

Her fashion career was peppered with firsts: the first avant-garde store on Madison Avenue in the 70’s, the first to cultivate Issey Miyake and Jean Paul Gautier, and the first fashion store to appear in SoHo, coinciding with an Artforum cover devoted to Miyake, the first Japanese franchise with Rei Kawabuko (the revolutionary SoHo Comme des Garcons).

The same originality that saturated Dianne Benson’s fashion philosophy has carried over into her life after fashion. Having turned to gardening and writing, she is working on the sequel to her cult gardening book, Dirt: the Lowdown on Growing a Garden with Style entitled Dirtier: a Passionate Gardener's Guide. She writes irreverently as the garden pundit for Hamptons Cottages and Gardens and contributes to other magazines such as Town and Country.

Dianne is Co-President of LongHouse Reserve, the 16 acre East Hampton sculpture garden and arboretum founded by Jack Lenor Larsen. She is also an active member of the Board of Directors of Robert Wilson's Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center Foundation and the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church; and simultaneously co-chairs Guild Hall's 'The Garden as Art' program.