Polly Mellen, Fashions Storied Cheerleader, Dies at 100

Polly Mellen, the irrepressible and indomitable fashion editor who was the last link to a long golden age when fashion editors were fearsome creatures who ruled by fiat, and a photograph in Vogue magazine, where Ms.Mellen worked for more than a quarter century, moved not just markets but the culture, died on Wednesday in Salisbury, Conn.

She was 100 — an attractive round number, which Ms.Mellen, ever the perfectionist, surely appreciated.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Leslie Bell.With the photographer Richard Avedon, her longtime collaborator, Ms.

Mellen created some of the most arresting images in contemporary fashion.There was Twiggy, the waifish 1960s avatar, one eye painted with a psychedelic flower, twinkling on the cover of Vogue in 1967.The actress Nastassja Kinski stretched out in the magazine’s pages in 1981, naked except for the boa constrictor coiled around her and an ivory cuff on one wrist.

(Ms.Mellen later regretted that cuff.

It was too distracting, she said.) Rudolf Nureyev was unaccessorized and completely naked in a spread that appeared in Vogue in 1967.With Helmut Newton, in 1975, Ms.Mellen produced “The Story of Ohh,” which included a photo of the model Lisa Taylor, legs akimbo, with one hand tucked suggestively in the pocket of her dress, gazing coolly at a male model’s backside — a potent expression of female agency and sexuality.

(In those days, fashion features were considered narratives, even if the plot seemed nonsensical to civilians.This one was in homage to the popular French erotic novel “The Story of O.”)Ms.

Mellen had been a protégée of Diana Vreeland, the famously hortatory fashion director of Harper’s Bazaar in the 1950s who memorably declared the bikini to be the most important thing since the atomic bomb (and pink to be the navy blue of India), and who brought Ms.Mellen to Vogue soon after she became its editor in 1962.

She also brought Mr.Avedon, with whom Ms....