Towards the end of World War II, Mrs. Irvine met a naval officer at Delmonico's restaurant while on leave; they married in 1947. In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Sullivan, Mrs. Irvine is survived by a son, who requested anonymity for himself and her father, whose name she shares, and two grandchildren. Mrs. Irvine's husband died in 1994.
When her daughter was born in 1957, Irvine left Elizabeth Arden and became a freelance makeup artist, working for photographers such as Avedon, Irving Penn, John Rawlings and Harold Krieger. She also did commercial work, notably covering actors playing the Jolly Green Giant, the mascot created to sell canned vegetables, in layers of green grease paint.
In the late 1960s, Mrs. Irvine and her family moved from Queens to Essex County, New Jersey. Her husband, general counsel of a security company, did not want his wife to continue working, so she retired and learned to drive at age 44.
Once she left the fashion world behind, she rarely talked about it.
Parsons, the TikTok star, had many questions for Irvine that were left unanswered by his death. I had hoped Irvine might illuminate stories of the kind of esotericism that paralyzes Monroe obsessives: for example, did Robert Champion, a hairdresser who was at the Garden when Ms. Monroe sang, really touch up her makeup and blow-dry her hair? lips? with a tissue (an artifact that belongs to the Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum in Orlando, Florida)? Did Ms. Irvine recognize a tube of gold lipstick that once belonged to Ms. Monroe and that Ms. Parsons had won at auction for $15,625?
Irvine was glad to have had her own moment of fame, although she wished, as she told her daughter, that the attention had come when she had more energy to pursue it.
“I told him the important thing was that it happened,” Sullivan said. “She was an original and unique person who worked in the dark to create many beautiful images with the pioneering photographers of the 20th century. After all, how many 99-year-olds who attended one-room schools become TikTok stars?
