Elsa Klensch (née Aeschbacher; 21 February 1930 – 4 March 2022) was an Australian and American journalist, novelist, and television personality, often working in the world of fashion.
[1][2] Klensch was born on 21 February 1930 in Cooranbong, in the Lake Macquarie District of New South Wales, to Johann Ernst and Mary Margaret (née Miles) Aeschbacher.
She was married to Charles Klensch, whom she met in Hong Kong while he was on leave from his post as Saigon, South Vietnam, news bureau manager for the American Broadcasting Company.
She edited the Hong Kong Trade Bulletin, Women's Wear Daily, and was senior fashion editor at Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, New York Post, and for WCBS-TV.
Subsequently, she was a regional editor for the Australian Broadcasting's TV Weekly, where she raised circulation and advertising with promotion and livelier editorial content, setting the pattern for a successful national campaign for the magazine which earned her praise for "splendid work and exceptional efforts."
That same year, she retired from her Hong Kong assignments in order to marry Charles Klensch in Saigon and move to New York where, from 1966 to 1972, she reported for Fairchild Publications.
Style with Elsa Klensch reached 2.5 million households in the United States each week, becoming CNN's highest-rated weekend feature-news program at its time.
Based in New York City, Klensch traveled overseas three or four months a year to report from the other fashion capitals of Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and London.
In June 2002, Forge Books, a division of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, signed Klensch to write a series of four mystery novels featuring television news producer Sonya Iverson as amateur sleuth.
In 1994, she made a cameo appearance in Robert Altman's film Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter) and in several episodes of the CBS soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the CNN archive of a thousand weeks of Style with Elsa Klensch for its Costume Institute.