Fashion icon and artist Gloria Vanderbilt dies at 95

Fashion icon and artist Gloria Vanderbilt has passed away, her son Anderson Cooper announced on Monday. She was 95.

"Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms," Cooper said.

"She was a painter, a writer and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife and friend. She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her and they'd tell you she was the youngest person they knew - the coolest and most modern."

Gloria died at home surrounded by friends and family, according to CNN. She was diagnosed with advanced stage cancer earlier this month.

Gloria was born on February 24, 1924. Her father was the renowned rake, Reginald Vanderbilt. Gloria lost her father at the tender age of just 18-month-old. She became very famous after following a tussle between her mother and her aunt for custody.

She started her modelling career at 15, when she was photographed for Harper's Bazaar, the first of many appearances as a fashion model. She then appeared in Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines

She married Hollywood agent Pat DiCicco in 1941 at just 17, which ended up in divorce four-year later.

She remarried to conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was 63 at the time. With Stokowski, she had two children Leopold Stokowski was born in 1950, Christopher Stokowski in 1952.

In 1954, She made her stage debut in a production of the romantic drama, "The Swan," at the Pocono Playhouse in Mountainhome, Pennsylvania.

She then met director and producer Sidney Lumet, who was known for movies like "12 Angry Men", "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Network".

They married in 1956. But this marriage too, like in past, did not prove successful. They got divorced in 1963.

She, for a final, married writer Wyatt Cooper. With him, she had two more sons: Carter Cooper in 1965 and Anderson Cooper in 1967.

While trying other avenues for her creativity, she produced fashion and textile designs that would earn her the 1969 Neiman Marcus Fashion Award.

in the 1970s, she opened her ready-to-wear garments line. Under her GV Ltd. brand, she'd go on to sell millions of pairs of jeans bearing her signature and trademark swan logo.

"If you were around in the early 1980s it was pretty hard to miss the jeans she helped create, but that was her public face -- the one she learned to hide behind as a child," Anderson Cooper said. "Her private self, her real self -- that was more fascinating and more lovely than anything she showed the public."

Her wide-ranging career also included art, as well as memoir and fiction writing. At 85 she wrote an erotic novel called Obsession which told the story of a woman becoming obsessed with her deceased husband's relationship with a dominatrix.