Mary McFadden, eccentric ‘high priestess of fashion’ whose society gowns evoked ancient civilisations

She got her name back in the press in 1989 when she announced, aged 50, her fourth marriage to a 22-year-old design student, Kohle Yohannan. She milked tabloid attention in their on-and-off romance for a good two years, at one point characterising him as a “cheap toy-boy”, “a spaced-out delinquent” and “a complete flake”, although they remained friends.

She closed her ready-to-wear business in 2002, but her clothes retained a cult following, fetching high prices secondhand.

A sixth (or seventh, depending on accounts) marriage, to the 31-year-old director Vasilios Calitsis in 1996, also ended in divorce. She would later claim to have been married 11 times, although some of these were “only spiritual”. Her partner until his death in 2019 was Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel laureate in physics.

Her daughter by her first marriage died in 2023.

Mary McFadden, born October 1 1938, died September 13 2024​