The exhibition includes more than 40 complete outfits, the lion's share of which were donated by her daughter Cornelia.

C.Z. Guest, or “cool vanilla lady” as Capote liked to call her, is being honored for the first time with a retrospective at the SCAD Fash Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta.

Open Thursday until Feb. 21, the exhibition, titled “C.Z. Guest: Portrait of an American Style Icon,” was curated in collaboration with Stefano Tonchi and is being presented by Max Mara, one of the iconic socialite’s favorite ready-to-wear labels.

Included are more than 40 complete outfits, the lion’s share of which were donated by her daughter Cornelia and are being preserved by SCAD Fash as part of its permanent archive.

According to Cornelia Guest, SCAD was the perfect spot to house the collection because, not only is it a museum, it’s part of a larger university and she wanted students to have intimate access. “I wanted them to be able to see these clothes,” she said, “to study how everything was created, how they were stitched, the craftsmanship. That was so important to me.”

Tracing C.Z. Guest’s history through her wardrobe is like tracing the history of 20th-century fashion itself, no small undertaking for Tonchi, who stumbled across the collection two years ago while working on a separate exhibition for SCAD’s Museum of Art in Savannah.

“I was intrigued by the amount and the variety of the pieces,” he said. “Everything from gowns to bathrobes, riding boots to penny loafers, fur jackets to cashmere twinsets — often in multiples of 10.

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