Mary is an educator and historian specializing in fashion and its relationship to art and commerce. Her latest book, Paul Poiret: Inventing Modern Luxury, is the first study of the designer to examine his legacy as the creator of the luxury industry as we know it today. In a wide-ranging career, she has held positions as a professor and dean as well as posts with the President’s Commission on Organized Crime and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. She is currently a member of the Capstone Faculty at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale.

Mary has just published the book Paul Poiret: Inventing Modern Luxury (Reaktion, 2025), and is the author of the books Ballets Russes Style: Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion (Reaktion, 2010),   Erik Satie (Reaktion, 2008), and  Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (University of California Press, 2006).

Mary earned Ph.D. and A.M. degrees in Musicology from Harvard University, where she was a Whiting Fellow.  She also holds an M.A. in Musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music and an M.M. in Piano from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.  She earned her undergraduate degree in Music (magna cum laude) from St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame.  She and her husband, Richard Gordon, divide their time between New York City’s West Village and Red Truck Farm in Bethany, Connecticut.