Former WWD Textiles Editor On-Ke Wilde Dies at 79 in New York City

Former Women’s Wear Daily textiles editor On-Ke Wilde died Monday at the age of 79. She died of respiratory failure in her New York apartment, according to her daughter, Siobhan Wilde. Wilde was born in Yakima, Wash., and grew up in Portland, Ore. But the Northwest’s near-constant cloud cover didn’t agree with her, so she headed East to get her MFA thanks to a painting scholarship she earned through The New School’s Parsons School of Design. Her undergraduate days were spent at Portland State University. While her mother was a teacher and her father worked at a bank, Wilde and her three siblings took to painting and in one case drawing. (Her younger brother Yeu Bun joined her in Manhattan, after earning the same art scholarship that she had.) Living in Paris in the late Sixties, she met her husband James, a foreign correspondent for Time magazine, on a blind date. “He proposed to her the next day, but they didn’t get married until a month later,” their daughter said with a laugh. “Of course, I thought that was perfectly normal while growing up. Then I realized how crazy they were.” After school she had worked for a stint at WWD before moving to Paris.

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