Jane Thompson dies at 89

To imagination-starved American households that needed a dash of style in the 1950s and ’60s, and to moribund urban waterfronts that needed a dose of hope in the ’70s and ’80s, the designers Jane and Benjamin C. Thompson brought vibrancy and variety, colors and textures, and (nice) smells.

Mrs. Thompson made her mark first as the co-editor of the pioneering magazine Industrial Design. After marrying Mr. Thompson in 1969, she joined him in planning transformative festival marketplaces in Boston, Baltimore and New York, and in cultivating Design Research, his small but influential chain of clothing and home furnishing stores.

She died on Monday at her home in Cambridge, Mass., 14 years — almost to the day — after her husband. She was 89. The cause was cancer, her daughter, Sheila McCullough, said.

“Ben and Jane Thompson have made their mark on Boston,” Carol Stocker of The Boston Globe wrote in 1979, “and it is a deep dent in the city’s Puritan tradition of sensory restraint.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/jane-thompson-dead.html?_r=0