Sondra Lipton

Sondra Lipton is a New York City native who built successive careers as a Broadway dancer, fashion model, and painter. She received her early training at Julia Richman High School and the School of American Ballet, the institution founded by George Balanchine. Her ballet studies led directly to stage work, and she appeared on Broadway between 1946 and 1948, with credits including Willie the Weeper and Yours Is My Heart. In May 1948, Lipton was a member of the dance company that participated in the Experimental Theatre's presentation of Ballet Ballads, performed as part of a series of events at the Maxine Elliott Theatre.

At nineteen, standing 5'9", Lipton concluded she was too tall to continue as a dancer and redirected her ambitions toward modeling. She applied at Christian Dior's New York City location, where the French couturier quickly took notice of her and advised her to preserve rather than alter her distinctive appearance. Lipton has red hair, amber eyes, an aquiline nose, and large teeth. In January 1949, she modeled designs by Fira Benenson at the Pierre Hotel during a New York Heart Association Benefit. By November 1960, she was among thirteen models chosen to represent Mannequin, a newly established New York modeling agency. Over the course of a twenty-year runway career, she took on varied assignments, including a 1964 appearance at a Sisters of Mercy convention where she modeled a new religious habit designed by Dublin-born couturier Sybil Connolly, who had spent two and a half years developing the project.

During her modeling years, Lipton began studying sculpture at New York University as a means of relaxation. Sculptor Joe Eula lent her his studio at one point, but she eventually found sculpting too difficult and isolating and turned instead to painting, which she began in 1963. Her oil paintings, primarily still lifes of flowers and fruits, attracted notable collectors including Mrs. Winthrop Rockefeller, Mrs. Gardner Cowles, Sir David Webster, and film producer Ross Hunter. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson received one of her oils as a Christmas gift. In 1969, twenty of her paintings were exhibited at an eighth-floor gallery at Lord & Taylor, with prices ranging from $190 to $300. That same year, Lipton was living in an East Side Manhattan apartment with her twelve-year-old son; her husband was Jack Sahlman, a sales representative for California and European dress houses.

In 1976, Lipton partnered with former fashion model Claire Geiman to create Dining-In, a line of table linens. The easy-care cotton collection comprised five basic groups, one of which was named Scarboro and featured a floral motif in color combinations including lime and blue, terracotta and peach, and chocolate and beige, all with white designs. The line was introduced and sold by Lord & Taylor, with prices ranging from sixty cents for cocktail napkins to $44 for an 88-inch round cloth.