My glamorous friend Jibby Beane, who has died aged 84, was known in London’s fashion and art worlds as an energetic and unique figure. Blessed with fabulous blond good looks, during the 1990s she appeared on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood, was featured in countless style magazines and ran an art gallery from her first-floor flat in Paddington, central London. The artist Martin Creed first showed his work there in 1994; he won the Turner prize seven years later.
Wherever Jibby arrived, laced into a Westwood corset and tottering on platform shoes, everyone knew who she was. She had started modelling in the 60s and appeared in the first Andrex television commercial to feature a labrador retriever puppy in 1972. She had also worked for the couturier Victor Stiebel. In 1963 she married Kenneth Beane, whom she had known since childhood.
Talented at decorating houses, and selling them, she studied interior design and got a diploma from Richmond Adult College in the late 80s. She went on to establish her own company, Dream Designs, and worked occasionally at the Design and Decoration Building in Chelsea, where she was a greeter; there she met Westwood in the ladies’ loos. She had also met a young art student, Jonathan Goslan, in 1991, which led to her separation from Ken.
By 1992, Jibby was the face of Westwood’s Mayfair stores, holding court every Saturday as she slipped into one outfit after another. “She seemed to have multiple sides – from diva to comedian,” said Mark Garcia, a colleague. “But my favourite was the one she called ‘Mother Beane’. If you needed advice, or comfort, or reassurance, she would give it all. She was incredibly kind.”
With Goslan she began attending the openings and art events that were lighting up London with the Young British Artists, and opened her own home gallery in 1994 to support emerging talent. For one exhibition, an arrangement of soap in tiny dishes by Hadrian Pigott surrounded the bathroom mirror.
Jibby was born Mavis Foster in Maida Vale, London, to Mabel Foster, a Liverpudlian who worked in an office by day and as a cinema usherette by night, and Dennis Thomsett, who left the family when Jibby was nine and her sister, Valerie, was eight. Jibby liked to say that she grew up “in one room and a bucket”. She went to the Royal Alexandra and Albert school, a state boarding school near Reigate, Surrey, where she was head girl. She had a talent for ballet, but could not afford to pursue the training.
A move in 1996 to Clerkenwell meant the end of the gallery, but by now Beane and Goslan were focused on New York, where they lunched with Quentin Crisp, hung out with David Bowie, and Mario Testino took Jibby’s picture for W magazine. The pink Westwood platform shoes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection belonged to Jibby.
She is survived by her children, Oliver and Henrietta, from her marriage, two grandsons, Red and Ash, and her sister, Val.
