Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and the artistic director of Condé Nast, said in a telephone interview: “What she was accomplishing during her time working in magazines was groundbreaking. While she was shooting Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe, she was also shooting a very simple black dress or a simple suit to give them personality as much as any public figure.”

Beatrice Crosby de Menocal was born into a family of privilege on April 9, 1913, in Beijing (known then as Peking). Her father, Daniel Ammen de Menocal, descended from an aristocratic Cuban family; her mother, Beatrice (Crosby) de Menocal, was a New York society beauty with a Washington Square address.

Beatrice was the oldest of four — Richard, Esmee and Daniel followed — and the family moved to South America before eventually settling in Boston. They lived the kind of life indexed in The Social Register: summers in Nantucket and debutante comings-out, all documented by an affectionate press. Mr. de Menocal settled into a banker’s life, rising to become vice president of the First National Bank of Boston.

In 1935, the young Miss de Menocal married William Simpson of Chicago, a Harvard man, in what The Boston Globe called “one of the most important weddings of the June season.” But the marriage was not to be a long one. Though the newlyweds set up house in Locust Valley, on Long Island’s North Shore — where they lived with an English butler and three maids, according to the 1940 census — after seven years of marriage they divorced and Mrs. Simpson made for New York City.

She dabbled in low culture as well as high — she remembered celebrating the end of Prohibition with a group of boys by heading down to Boston’s tattoo parlors — but fell in with a glamorous crowd in New York, befriending the likes of the jewelry designer Fulco di Verdura and the hairdresser Kenneth. She was a regular at Café Nicholson, the Midtown Manhattan haunt of Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal that put the cafe in cafe society in the postwar years.