A memorial service will be held on Sunday for fashion publicist Sandra Graham at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

Graham. 83, died from leukemia and endocrine cancer on May 14 at the Calvary Hospice Center in New York City, according to her daughter Rebecca Cox. Born in Montgomery, W.Va., and raised in MIchigan, Graham trained to be a respiratory therapist after graduating from Lincoln Park High School. For 20 years, she worked in that capacity at the Riverside Osteopathic Hospital in Trenton, Mich. As a mother of four, Graham had first gotten a hankering for Manhattan as an avid reader of The New Yorker, as well as Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Switching career tracks, she worked with small boutiques in Michigan and traveled to New York, California and Texas for buying trips. Graham also teamed up with hairstylists and makeup artists to appear on local cable shows to offer styling advice in the 1970s and 1980s. The entrepreneurial Graham offered to work with women in their homes and also organized gift-giving shopping events that were targeted at men for Valentine’s Day and other key holidays. Eventually, that experience would be the catalyst to create Graham Communications.

After she and her first husband Darrell Graham divorced in the 1970s, Graham later relocated to New York City to get further into fashion, where she stayed for more than 40 years.

Cox said, “It was like she had two lives — and each one was lived to the fullest. One was in Michigan with the family, the kids and the respiratory therapy job. She even got promoted to pulmonary functionalist to work with an innovative new machine. And she had her life in New York.”

Her New York career started at the directional specialty store Charivari where other yet-to-be-discovered fashion talents like Marc Jacobs worked the cash register. After a run at the jewelry company Krementz & Co. in the 1980s, she moved on to Halston in its Randolph Duke years. Later at posts at Vivienne Tam and Reem Acra, she became a forerunner to celebrity dressing by linking up with Tina Knowles to dress her daughter Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child — at a time when few public relations directors were giving Black celebrities their due respect.

Graham also had a hand in actress Minnie Driver’s winning look at the Oscars, and Taraji P. Henson’s 2006 Oscars look. “In the 1990s, Sandy was at the forefront of what has become an extremely critical part of the fashion machine, which is the work between the stylist, the celebrity and the PR person representing the house. Now we take that for granted,” said Constance C. R. White, an award-winning fashion journalist. “Sandy was creating these invaluable relationships with stylists, who very much worked behind-the-scenes.”

Concurrently, major designers like Versace, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana and other major brands were on the rise. Phillip Bloch, Jessica Paster, Elizabeth Saltzman and Arianne Phillips were a few of the stylists that she connected with, White said. “Back then there was this very delicate dance that she did so well, while representing independent designers, who were going up against these big-name, big-wallet brands. Yet, she was able to get these celebrities into these dresses by her understanding of the game, her charisma and the delicate relationships that she had with stylists and in some cases with the celebrity themselves,” White said.

In 2010, Graham lined up the jewelry including a $1 million diamond necklace for the wedding of Olympic gold medalist Sanya Richards’ nuptials to Super Bowl winner Aaron Ross. For her own attire, Graham was known to shop at vintage stores to wear “the funkiest, weirdest things” to see how strangers reacted to get a sense for what intrigued people, Cox said. Another example of that ingenuity stemmed from necessity. As the stylist for a fashion show at Harrods in London that championed size inclusivity and had had the support of Princess Diana prior to her death, Graham and the team were asked to carry on with the project by the royal’s brother Charles Spencer after she was killed. Cox said, “My mom had gotten all these clothes together not realizing that the show was for bigger women and not for the smaller women she was used to working with. To improvise, she ended up getting scarves, drapes and fabrics to pull it all off. She was very good at last minute changes so that people could wear it with confidence, in order to sell it.”

Although Graham was not intimidated by any stars, there was one exception, her daughter said. While working for Randolph Duke at Halston, she was a little uneasy during a breakfast with John F. Kennedy Jr. that was held in memory of his mother Jackie Onassis, who wore a Roy Halston-designed hat to the 1961 presidential inauguration. She headed up public relations and sales at Halston in the early 1990s.

Graham was very comfortable changing up her own look. Cox said that she sometimes approached the wrong woman in airports, mistakenly thinking that they were her mother. “There was the geometric perm and then the red hair, and then the blonde hair. She tried it all, and she loved every minute of it,” Cox said. ”She wasn’t afraid to try something new to see what kind of reaction she would get. And she had a great personality to go along with it.”

Graham’s panache for red carpet trends never waned, nor did her all-black dress code change, her daughter said. “She would critique the Oscars. Even when she was close to being near-death and was disoriented, she was talking about designing clothes that she would wear and she was rearranging the room. She would tell the doctors that her hair was too red and that she really needed an updated hairdo,” Cox said with a laugh, adding that medical workers routinely asked what Graham’s profession had been due to how proper she was.

Graham often gathered friends in her New York City apartment for long conversations over a glass a wine or a meal. The walls were covered with art — much of which she mined from flea markets, Cox said.

Graham orchestrated the plans for her memorial service, which will be held at the same church where she met her second husband Arthur Caliandro, while singing in the gospel choir. Cox said, “She very carefully picked out the music and the pictures. I don’t want to change anything.”

Graham was predeceased by Caliandro, as well as her parents Michael Thomas and Anna Ruth Johnson and her sister Jane Sherberg. In addition to Cox, Graham is survived by her daughters Catherine Milot, and Jayne Michellle Gorham, her son Matthew Graham and her brother James Michael Johnson.

In lieu of flowers, Graham’s family requests that donations be made to the Grey Muzzle Organization at the Marble Collegiate Church.