The LEGACY of LIZ TILBERIS

In honor of OVARIAN CANCER Awareness Month, CHRIS TILBERIS recalls the work of his late mother, who ushered in a new GOLDEN AGE for Harper's Bazaar in the '90s while waging her own BATTLE with the disease.

- STEPHEN MOOALLEM

I was seven years old when my family moved to New York from London. It was January of 1992, and my mother had just been named editor in chief of Harper's Bazaar. She'd been the editor of Vogue in the U.K., where both my parents were from. She loved that job, having started out at the magazine two decades earlier as an assistant. We had family and friends in London. One of my earliest memories involved presenting flowers to Princess Diana.

She and our mom had gotten to know each other during her time at Vogue. Looking back now, it all seems a bit surreal. But even as a kid, I had this strong sense that it must have taken a pretty special opportunity for her and our dad to leave all that behind and move with me and my older brother, Rob, who was 11 at the time, across an ocean and around the world. The opportunity to come to the U.S. and reimagine a magazine like Bazaar was one she couldn't pass up.

It was a big transition for all of us. I remember our first two or three months in New York, we lived in a hotel. The food was different. So was the weather. My brother and I had to learn about new sports, like baseball and basketball, and make new friends.

Our mom wanted to make sure that we stayed connected to our family in England, but at the same time she also wanted us to become fully engaged with the new one we found forming around us in New York. The fashion world is small, so we were very lucky to have people around us like our mom’s friend Grace Coddington, whom she’d worked with at British Vogue. Grace herself had relocated to the States after becoming creative director of the American edition. Our mom also knew Patrick Demarchelier, who was one of the first photographers to sign on with her to shoot for Bazaar. He, his wife, Mia, and their sons, Gustaf, Arthur, and Victor, were incredibly welcoming to us all—as were the editor in chief of Esquire at the time, Terry McDonell, and his family.