Surely the most bizarre, but instructive, style lesson inadvertently taught by that eternal arbiter of taste, Diana Vreeland, is just how treacherously fast the presence and influence of the reigning Empress of guilt-free luxury faded from the fused worlds of haute couture and international high society she once ruled.
Almost from the moment Vreeland (fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar for 27 years and editor in chief at Vogue for nine) was felled by a massive heart attack in New York, 22 August 1989 at the age of…. actually, a lady never tells her age…let’s mutter Eightysomething and hurry along… Vreeland decayed from a la mode to old hat close to overnight. Tragic fate! The figurehead who for decades decided what the wealthy and with- it wore, where they ate, the best boltholes to buy and furnish and – absolutely vital – who was ‘in’, was, suddenly, ever so brutally out.
True, the tributes to the flamboyant and relentlessly ‘on’ woman were predictably lavish. “She was and remains the only genius fashion editor,’’ gushed Richard Avedon, the photographer she transformed into the first superstar snapper.
Yet by 1990, the one time legendary monster sacre and her signature shade of lacquered scarlet (on lips, fingernails, ball gowns, carpets and walls) was a shorthand joke for how shallow, powerful fashionistas are supposed to behave, aka Mode magazine gorgon Wilhelmina Slater in TV’s Ugly Betty. Which is to say, without irony. Indeed, Vreeland’s after-image is almost as mannered, campy and irrelevant as …Well, as cabaret star Kay Thompson’s hyperactive caricature of Vreeland in the 1957 musical Funny Face, barking “Think Pink!” at an army of assistants and bullying timid book shop employee Audrey Hepburn into becoming a catwalk sensation swathed in Givenchy.
In death this demeaning speed freak echo swiftly drowned out the exquisitely constructed upbeat, aphorism dropping myth Vreeland had been inventing since she realised not being beautiful was no impediment to being spectacular: the myth who advised Jackie Kennedy to limit the colour palate of her White House wardrobe, made Twiggy not merely a model but a role model, snatched the bikini from the sensuous beaches of St Tropez and deposited the two piece on the puritan shores of America, and imperiously granted the stuffy matrons of Mayfair, Bel Air and Park Avenue permission to don proletariat Sixties denim – “Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola”…
Diana Vreeland as fashion director at Harper’s Bazaar
How strange that the canny talent who brilliantly toyed with top, middle and low pop culture – who instinctively understood what garment, accessory or seasonal hue might move the masses, regardless of income and class – should shrink to a whisper evoked only by cultists and cognoscenti.
Would Vreeland have minded? No. Dee-Ann knew the score. As she cheerfully philosophised to a momentarily passe Truman Capote: “My dear, life is exactly like fashion. You can never be sure what will come around again or when – but you can be sure that it will.”
So call DV’s new profile less a comeback, more a stately resurrection across the multi-media she used to own. In 2006 she haunted celluloid twice. There’s Illeana Douglas as DV hanging out with Warhol in Factory Girl and Juliet Stevenson comforting Capote again in Infamous, both accurate full throttle performances upstaging the films nominal stars without lapsing into the cartoon. Who was that? asked a new generation. Had she really coined the terms Youthquake, Pizzazz and The Beautiful People? Did she really advise blondes to rinse with dead champagne to tease out the gold in their locks? Did she really drape herself over a leopardskin sofa in red chiffon, drag smoke from an ebony-and-onyx cigarette holder and tell Cecil Beaton, “The secret of my great success is simplicity, darling, simplicity”?
Yes, yes and yes.
Appetites were whetted. Websites went up. The Buzz (another Vreeland phrase) began.
By 2009 Sarah Jessica Parker too was impersonating the Ultimate Style Queen in patented DV poses for Harper’s Bazzar, her idol’s alma mater. 2011 saw Eleanor Dwight’s Diana Vreeland: An Illustrated Biography, bookended by reissues of Vreeland’s own fast-and-loose-with-facts autobiography D.V. and her eccentric style and life guide, Allure, with a new foreword by a clearly intoxicated Marc Jacobs. This July Atelier Swarovski ballyhooed their DV Legacy Collection in collaboration with The Diana Vreeland Estate, the same force behind 2012’s final restoration touches to the risen icon.
On the 10th Vreeand was (very) belatedly inducted into LA’s Rodeo Drive Walk of Style while New York Fashion Week celebrated the first of the world wide premieres of The Eye Has to Travel, the simply too too divine bio-doc produced and directed by Vreeland’s daughter-in-law Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Lisa is unapologetic about her mission.“ Diana will finally be presented in a big way to both longtime fans and younger generations… Mrs. Vreeland was a rebel who lived life with the freedom to make her own choices. Her passion, imagination, and fantasies were her driving forces. I hope viewers will fall under her enchanting spell—and perhaps also dare to think a bit differently.”
The film’s timing couldn’t be better on any number of levels (even better is the forthcoming Christmas and stocking filler appearance of the latest biography, i, by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart). While certainly not intended as a rebuke to The September Issue, the last hit fashion bio-doc, The Eye Has To Travel is still a bitch slap to the grim work ethic of Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour and Grace Coddington, Vreeland’s dour successor clones at American Vogue. The Eye Has To Travel likewise offers a welcome jolt of high octane glamour to the global zeitgeist of angst and Great Depression. The second Vreeland appears with her Easter Island face and stiff black helmet of hair – a friend claims a waiter once bumped it with a tray and a distinct thud was heard – and launches into her Grand Dame/Auntie Mame act (“I must have fanfare!”) you half expect the soundtrack to erupt into ‘C’mon Forget Your Troubles, Get Happy…’
Diana Vreeland at 21, by George Platt Lynes
This, of course, is what Wintour and Coddington cannot, from sheer constitution, supply and what’s mostly missing from what used to be called Good Living today. Grace, charm, enthusiasm, fun, wit, personality… Pizzazz!
And all of it self taught. If the documentary recounts a familiar tale of the many, many pretend-people who inhabit fashion it’s one worth repeating: How To Bury Yourself And Become The Character You Always Wanted To Be.
For this we can first thank France. Though raised in the core of the Big Apple, DV was born in Paris circa 1903 and if she could be disparaging about the nation’s “rigid good taste” she nevertheless personifies any number of native expressions, joilie-lade and joie de vivre to name but wo. We may also thank Vreeland’s mother, the gorgeous socialite Emily Key Hoffman, who made her daughter feel every inch the problem child: “It’s too bad that you have such a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly and so terribly jealous of her. This is why you are so impossible to deal with.”
Small wonder the scarlet thread running through Vreeland’s personal and professional wisdom to all the unadventurous in the universe was: refuse to be what the mob – or your mother – says. Be what you want to be and to hell with the rest. Consider what DV confided to her diary, “For years I have been looking out for girls to idealize because they are things to look up to, because they are perfect. But since I have had never discovered that girl, I shall be that girl.”
The psychic makeover took. Drop dead handsome diplomat Reed Vreeland was desired by a multitude of debutantes and heiresses but it was ugly duckling Diana who became his adoring wife in 1924 and bore him two sons in rapid succession. If it hadn’t been for her own pride in her glittering appearance for him, would Harper’s Bazzar editor Carmel Snow have noticed and immediately registered that ‘certain something’ about DV as Vreeland twirled across the dance floor of the St.Regis hotel dressed in white lace Chanel, roses blossoming in her glossy black hair? That was in 1936 and Snow offered her a place on the masthead on the spot. What a scene it will make when the come to shoot the inevitable mini series.
Vreeland couldn’t believe her ridiculous good luck and that’s what she also shared throughout her entire trajectory: her ridiculous good luck. Tongue planted firmly in chic her Why don’t you? column – also just compiled in hardback – could be read as both utterly serious and as surreal spoof. Why don’t you… “Turn your child into an Infanta for a fancy-dress party?” Why don’t you… “paint a map of the world on all four walls of your boys’ nursery so they don’t grow up with a provincial point of view?” Why don’t you… rocket up the corporate ladder refashioning fashion as you whiz by? Photo layouts with light, space, narratives and themes? Done. Photo lay outs shot in Africa, the Amazon, with stallions wrapped in a ton and a half of synthetic hair? Done. Models with bumps on their noses, unshaped eyebrows and outrageously elongated, way out of classic proportion bodies? Ditto. Vreeland’s vision of Eve was all inclusive – and essentially pragmatic, a truth often lost in the carnival atmosphere she carried with her.
Vreeland at her eccentric home in Manhattan, by Horst P. Horst, 1979
DV’s home might have been an all blood red ‘Garden in Hell’, her office may have been a magpie’s trove of objet d’art, landscapes and eclectic stray images, and she may have traveled exclusively by chauffeured limo, but when her fashion editor at Vogue wanted to do a piece utilising long skirts Vreeland’s instant veto was the essence of practicality: “Oh, no, Carrie, modern women… they have to drive kids to school.”
Vreeland’s tenure as editor- in- chief at Vogue kicked off in 1963 and ended with her summary firing by the dull suits at Conde Nast in 1971, the charge being budgetary extravagance. (Yes, and your point would be…?) Nevertheless, those eight years marked the height of her extraordinary power. The Sixties rejection of social mores and demolition of boundaries between the Arts suited her like her trademark cashmere sweaters.
Vreeland was the mistress of mix and match and she did, gleefully dropping Mick Jagger into the same issue with Maria Callas, this when respectable folk thought of the Rolling Stone as the thick lipped, snake hipped End of Civilization. Her time there could have also marked her delayed revenge on her mother. Before Vreeland arrived Vogue was the stultifying in- house reading for the out- of- touch socialite crowd: the haughty embodiment of Emily Key Hoffman’s insular received values. Vreeland’s vitality opened the institution to Everywoman with a dream and determination and said, “Be bold.”
She followed her own advice. Betrayed by Vogue she took up with the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and through sheer force of will made her third act her finest and transformed their formerly academic clothes exhibitions into popular must-see Events. Out: drab. In: vivid. As her friend jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane recalled, “She made me appreciate the importance of positive thinking. She would say, ‘Don’t look back. Just go ahead. Give ideas away. Under every idea there’s a new idea waiting to be born.’ “
Also a new challenge. Diana Vreeland once quipped that being dead simply meant having nothing to do and, oh, imagine what she could do right now with the boom markets fast emerging full blown and eager across Asia and the Far East. Is it too presumptuous to think that a fresh flood of neophytes and pupils might take pleasure and find a sort of joy from the gentle coaxing and hard won experience of a Good Witch willing not only to teach, but also to learn from the character and cultures of her students?
Too much? Understood. Let’s end instead with Jackie Onassis’s words on the packed to capacity opening night of DV’s first Metropolitan Museum triumph: “To say Diana Vreeland has only dealt with fashion trivializes what she has done. She has commented on the times in a wise and witty manner. She has lived a life.” Written by John Lyttle. For more, visit dianavreeland.com. More stories like this are available in Quintessentially Asia.
