NEW YORK, NY.- Mary McFadden, a fashion designer who was famous not just for her shimmering, pleated dresses, which cascaded freely to the floor, but for her visage — stark white Kabuki-style makeup and bluntly cut ebony hair — died Friday at her home in Southampton, New York. She was 85.

Her brother John McFadden said the cause was myeloma dysplasia.

McFadden took symbols from ancient cultures — the phoenix from China, shadow puppets from Indonesia — and translated them into intricate embroideries, beadings and paintings on her clothes.

At Mary McFadden Inc., the company she ran from 1976 to 2002, she designed pleated dresses that she said she wanted to fall “like liquid gold” down a woman’s body. They were similar to those made by Mariano Fortuny and Henriette Negrin early in the 20th century, but they were made from a synthetic charmeuse that she sourced in Australia, dyed in Japan and machine-pressed in the United States — a fabric she patented in 1975 and called Marii.

She designed dresses that resembled those worn by the women sculpted on the caryatids at the Acropolis in Greece, and her models imitated their poses for fashion shoots under the pediment of the New York Public Library. Jacqueline Onassis was among those who wore McFadden gowns.

McFadden was the first female president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She served in that position from 1982 to 1983.

Author, pianist and composer Christopher Mason said that he often ran into McFadden in the late 1980s and ’90s, and that he once found himself seated next to her at a dinner hosted by Irish model Maxime de la Falaise for her daughter, Loulou.

“She had this enigmatic sphinxlike look, she wore this Kabuki-like white makeup and her face was very static as if she was accustomed to being stared at in awe, but she was great fun,” Mason said in an interview for this obituary. “Her conversation bristled with allusions to ancient civilizations, the jewels involved, and the ceremonial aspects of ancient and remote cultures.”

Mary McFadden was born in the New York City borough of Manhattan on Oct. 1, 1938, to Alexander McFadden, a cotton trader, and Mary Josephine (Cutting) McFadden. Her father came from a family of prominent cotton brokers. Her mother’s father, Fulton Cutting, was a pioneer in the development of commercial radio.

“She was an upper-class bohemian, offbeat and off-center,” journalist Michael Gross, who wrote a cover article about McFadden for New York magazine in 1990, said in an interview. “She grew up an extremely wealthy American in that milieu which is fairly well separated from the reality of most regular people.”

She and her brothers, George and John, spent their early childhood on a cotton plantation in Memphis, Tennessee. When she was 9, her father died in an avalanche while skiing in Aspen, Colorado, and her mother moved the family to the North Shore of Long Island in New York.

According to Gross, her mother paid little attention to her; they didn’t eat meals together (“because it was felt you had nothing interesting to say,” she told Gross), and she was not invited to dinner until she was 20.

John McFadden, a lawyer, disagreed with the characterization of his sister as an aristocratic bohemian. She was aristocratic, he acknowledged, and she was interested in the arts, but she was not bohemian. “She went to Foxcroft School” — a boarding school in Virginia — “and came out, and then went off to Europe and came back and went to charity balls.”

Their upbringing “wasn’t quite ‘Downton Abbey,’ as you might imagine,” he said. “But there were some elements of it in my mother’s generation. It was a fairly formal life.”

When the family lived in Memphis, they made an annual trip to New York City. On one of those visits, they went to the circus, where Mary McFadden bought a dozen live tiny chameleons. On the plane trip home, she pinned them to her lapel.

“I noticed no one wanted to sit next to me,” she wrote in her memoir, “Mary McFadden: A Lifetime of Design, Collecting, and Adventure” (2012). “The chameleons sadly had short lives.”

When she was 13, her maternal grandmother, Mary J. Armory Cutting, took her to couture shows in Paris. When she was 16, that same grandmother gave her three diamond bracelets. A few years later, in 1958, she met Salvador Dalí at a cocktail party at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, and struck a deal with him: her diamonds for some of his art.

She attended the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York City and later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and Columbia University in New York City.

In 1962, she blithely bartered her way into the world of fashion. She applied for a job as publicity director at Christian Dior-New York. Admitting that she knew nothing about publicity, she offered to work three months for no pay, on the condition that if the company liked her work, they could reimburse her in clothing: 50 dresses per year from Dior-New York and Dior-Paris. She did the work, and she got both the job and the dresses. She later sold the dresses and used the money to buy art.

In September 1964, she married Philip Harari, an executive with the De Beers jewelry company. They moved to Johannesburg, where her foray into design began.

She bought batik at the local markets and took her designs to local dressmakers. She also began writing for Vogue magazine.

In 1969, shortly after divorcing Harari, she married Frank McEwen, director of the Rhodes National Gallery (now the National Gallery of Zimbabwe). They divorced at the end of 1970. She returned to New York City.

While living in Africa, she wore her brown hair piled high in a bun. Back in New York, she adopted the look she became known for — a pitch-black bob and powdered pale skin — and launched her fashion company.

It all came about by happenstance. Her African-made tunics caught the attention of the editors at Vogue, where she had continued to work, and they offered to feature her line in an issue. Geraldine Stutz, president of Henri Bendel, a women’s department store, agreed to buy some of McFadden’s clothes, introduce her to a patternmaker and host a fashion show at the store.

A close friend of McFadden’s mother’s, Babe Paley, one of America’s most stylish women at the time, then began wearing her clothing. And what Paley wore or did, women copied. When her hair turned gray and she left it that way, Enid Nemy wrote in her New York Times obituary of Paley, “scores of silver-toned heads began to emerge from hiding.”

By 1975, when McFadden had patented her Marii fabric, her name became synonymous with that elegant and exotic look: a pleated column of fabric, often cascading to the floor. She eventually branched out into perfume, a more casual line of clothes and sheets, among other ventures.

She also married and divorced three more times: to Armin Schmidt, an unemployed young man she met at a nightclub; then to Kohle Yohannan, 30 years her junior, who would go on to become a historian of art and design; and then to Vasilios Calitsis, a theater director.

Despite a contentious divorce in 1992, she and Yohannan remained friends. “She was a great conversationalist, challenging, highly erudite,” he said in an interview for this obituary. “She was living an A-list bohemian life. She was obsessed with the Egyptians, the Sumerians. These embroideries came from tomb paintings, ancient jewelries. They’re a crossover between intellectual research and aesthetic reverie.”

In 2002, McFadden closed her business. British Vogue attributed the closing to “financial difficulties.” Yohannan had a somewhat different explanation: “Her customers died off. That was the swan song of cafe society of the 1990s, the Pat Buckleys, the Nan Kempners, the Carroll Petries. It was a lifestyle that Mary designed for, and it ceased to exist. The focus is now on starlets. It used to be on socialites.”

McFadden’s partner, Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, died in 2019. Her daughter from her first marriage, Justine Harari, died in 2023. Her brother John is her only immediate survivor.

In 2009, McFadden’s clothes were exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, as well as at the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Her work is currently the subject of an exhibition, “Modern Ritual: The Art of Mary McFadden,” at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

McFadden “was a true eccentric,” Gross said, “not someone wearing eccentricity as a fashion or as a cloak, but a true eccentric who was lucky enough to live that, in the fullest expression of her eccentricity.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.