Gloria Vanderbilt, the intrepid heiress, artist and romantic who began her extraordinary life as the “poor little rich girl” of the Great Depression, survived family tragedy and multiple marriages and reigned during the 1970s and '80s as a designer jeans pioneer, died Monday at the age of 95.

Vanderbilt was the great-great-granddaughter of financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and the mother of CNN newsman Anderson Cooper, who announced her death via a first-person obituary that aired on the network Monday morning.

Cooper said Vanderbilt died at home with friends and family at her side. She had been suffering from advanced stomach cancer, he noted.

“Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms,” Cooper said in a statement. “She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend. She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her, and they’d tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest, and most modern.”

Her life was chronicled in sensational headlines from her childhood through four marriages and three divorces. She married for the first time at 17, causing her aunt to disinherit her. Her husbands included Leopold Stokowski, the celebrated conductor, and Sidney Lumet, the award-winning movie and television director. In 1988, she witnessed the suicide of one of her four sons.

Tributes online came from celebrities and fans of her clothes alike. Alyssa Milano called her "an incredible woman," Dana Delany said she treasures one of Vanderbilt’s paintings and model Carol Alt hailed her as a “fashion icon and innovator.” And one Twitter user mourned by remembering the canary Vanderbilt jeans she wore in junior high school.

Vanderbilt was a talented painter and collagist who also acted on the stage ("The Time of Your Life" on Broadway in 1955) and television ("Playhouse 90," "Studio One," "Kraft Theater," "U.S. Steel Hour"). She was a fabric designer who became an early enthusiast for designer denim. The dark-haired, tall and ultra-thin Vanderbilt partnered with Mohan Murjani, who introduced a 1-million-U.S-dollar advertising campaign in 1978 that turned the Gloria Vanderbilt brand with its signature white swan label into a sensation.

At its peak in 1980, it was generating over 200 million U.S. dollars in sales. And decades later, famous-name designer jeans – dressed up or down – remain a woman’s wardrobe staple.

Vanderbilt wrote several books, including the 2004 chronicle of her love life: “It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir." She claimed her only happy marriage was to author Wyatt Cooper, which ended with his death in 1978 at age 50. Son Anderson Cooper called her memoir "a terrific book; it's like an older 'Sex and the City.'"

In 2016, Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper appeared together in the HBO documentary “Nothing Left Unsaid.”

Gloria Laura Madeleine Sophie Vanderbilt was born in 1924, a century after her great-great-grandfather started the family fortune, first in steamships, later in railroads. He left around 100 million U.S. dollars when he died in 1877 at age 82.

Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was 43, a gambler and boozer dying of liver disease when he married Gloria Morgan, 19, in 1923. Their daughter was one when Vanderbilt died in 1925, having gone through 25 million U.S. dollars in 14 years.

Beneficiary of a 5-million-U.S.-dollar trust fund, Vanderbilt became the "poor little rich girl" in 1934 at age 10 as the object of a custody fight between her globe-trotting mother and matriarchal aunt.

The aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 59, who controlled 78 million U.S. dollars and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, won custody of her niece.

The "poor little rich girl" nickname "bothered me enormously," Vanderbilt told The Associated Press in a 2016 interview. "I didn’t see any of the press – the newspapers were kept from me. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't feel poor and I didn't feel rich. It really did influence me enormously to make something of my life when I realized what it meant."

After her success in designer jeans, Vanderbilt branched out into other areas, including shoes, scarves, table and bed linens, and china, through her company, Gloria Concepts. In 1988 Vanderbilt joined the designer fragrance market with her signature "Glorious."

By the late 1980s, Vanderbilt sold the name and licenses for the brand name "Gloria Vanderbilt" to Gitano, who transferred it to a group of private investors in 1993. More recently, her stretch jeans have been licensed through Jones Apparel Group Inc., which acquired Gloria Vanderbilt Apparel Corp. in 2002 for 138 million U.S. dollars.

In 2009, the 85-year-old Vanderbilt penned a new novel, "Obsession: An Erotic Tale," a graphic tale about an architect’s widow who discovers a cache of her husband’s letters that reveal his secret sex life.