Adele Ray

Biography

In 1913, long before “statement dressing” had a name, Adele Ray marched through winter streets in a calf-splitting skirt and fur-wrapped ankles, betting the world would copy her. No one did. Undaunted, she reset the board: she divorced husband number one, crossed the Hudson, and erected a see-through house in Nyack, New York—walls of glass, roof of sky. Inside, she staged a one-woman ultraviolet rite she dubbed “the sun cure,” stripping to punched-hole tunics and bare feet while daylight poured in like liquid mercury. Even her horse got the treatment: the village tailor stitched it a pair of trousered leggings to shoo flies. The grateful animal bolted, carriage and all, smashed the rig to splinters, and deposited Adele—miraculously intact—on the roadside. When marriage two collapsed, vandals descended on the crystal cottage; the SPCA led the trousered horse to kinder pastures. Borrowing the surname Evelyn Word Leigh, Adele threatened to ring up President Roosevelt himself, certain the Nyack force couldn’t spot a culprit in a spotlight. Then she vanished south, resurfacing in Miami as high priestess of a lunar-worshipping sect that howled prayers at each rising moon.