Her real education, according to her memoir, Sex and Shopping (2000), was a post-college year in Paris in 1949, conning funds from her father to support her in fashion PR and pursuing romance with a Frenchman who proved, though older and sexy, not rich enough. Judith was born and bred in New York City, advancing from Birch Wathen school on the swanky Upper East Side to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her mother, Mary (nee Braeger), known as “Mickey”, had clawed her way from migrant poverty to a law degree her father, Jack Tarcher, a serial philanderer, owned an ad agency, and later was vice-president at Doyle Dane Bernbach. This deprivation had not been for lack of cash. “If she had, I never would have known the power, magic and mystery clothes could have. Unlike some of her heroines, Krantz did not start out poor, but she still felt she had been denied she told the New York Times that she kept dreaming in childhood that her mother would bring her home, among other goodies, a big package of cashmere sweaters. Scruples was Judith Krantz’s first novel, published in 1978. Krantz grasped that women were now curious about the exact details of highest-end luxury – a mere mention of mink was no longer enough. Couture was mutating into a spectacle confected to sell perfumes, and fashion had been for over a decade more about young fun than serious spending. Krantz, who has died aged 91, published her first novel, Scruples (its title was the name of an imagined Beverly Hills boutique) in 1978, when top international brands had not yet been absorbed into conglomerates and did not have branches around the globe nor advertise across multiple spreads in the glossies. Krantz believed that clothes comfort women and she was fervent about sartorial transformation, “I write about clothes as magical things that can change you … the character suddenly appears”, and that those characters were desirable and desiring only when perfectly dressed. There were antiques, art and bibelots on offer, plus real estate in select venues, but fashion always came first. The shopping in the novels of Judith Krantz had an intensity the sex could never match.

Scruples by Judith Krantz