“She was admired by everyone who was important at that time in New York: Halston, Andy Warhol, Saint Laurent, Diana Vreeland, the society ladies who loved her,” the fashion journalist André Leon Talley, a friend since the mid-1970s, said in a phone interview.

As a model in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ms. Schiano didn’t look like her competition — her features were more assertive than conventionally pretty — but she nevertheless appeared in the pages of Vogue, in its American, British and French editions, as well as in other fashion magazines of the time.

Ms. Vreeland was particularly taken by her. “I suspect that Diana Vreeland liked her because somehow she reminded her of herself,” the designer Diane von Furstenberg, who met Ms. Schiano in about 1970, said in a phone interview.

“Diana Vreeland liked to discover people who looked different,” she added.

It was as a model that Ms. Schiano met the designer for whom she would become muse and, eventually, employee: Mr. Saint Laurent. Ms. Schiano both reflected and inspired his aesthetic of the period, with designs that were refined but often comfortably wearable.