Caresse Crosby died in Rome, Italy, on January 26, 1970.
Caresse Crosby died on January 26, 1970, in Rome, Italy, bringing to a close a life that spanned an extraordinary range of cultural roles — inventor, publisher, patron of the arts, memoirist, and peace activist.
By the time of her death, Crosby had lived through the Gilded Age of New York society, the Lost Generation's bohemian Paris of the 1920s (where she and her second husband Harry Crosby founded the Black Sun Press, publishing works by writers such as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway), and later decades devoted to art patronage and world federalist activism in Italy at her home, Roccasinibalda.
Her death marked the end of an era for many who had known her as a connector of artists, writers, and intellectuals across two continents. Though she is most popularly remembered today for her early invention of the modern brassiere, her contemporaries and later historians also recognized her profound contributions to literary publishing and cultural patronage.
She is buried in Massachusetts, and her legacy endures both in fashion history and in the annals of twentieth-century literary modernism.