Empress of Fashion (16 page)

“I didn't know then what I was going to do when I got to New York. But I knew how to do what I did when I did it because of what I'd learned in Europe. It was a brief period of luxury that gave me my
whole career
,” said Diana. Her first “Why Don't You?” column appeared in
Bazaar
in March 1936. It opened with “Why don't you zip yourself into your evening dresses?” for the zipper had only just been introduced to the couture by Elsa Schiaparelli. In the very next line Diana submitted that the reader of
Bazaar
should “waft a big bouquet about like a fairy wand.” After that there was no stopping her. Many of her columns naturally revolved around the presentation of the self. “Why Don't You sweep into the drawing-room on your first big night with an enormous red-fox muff with many skins?” Diana inquired. “Nothing is smarter with your shooting tweeds than linen gaiters,” she opined, unless it was donning “Suzanne Talbot's black crepe glove embroidered in gold, like the hand that bore a falcon.” She had many suggestions for refreshing a tired old outfit: “Why Don't You have the sleeves of your mink made square and bulky and cut off six inches above the wrist? Then pull on big hand-sewn chamois gloves to keep you warm.”

Spearing one's tweeds with a Scotch kilt pin of mauve, green, and pink stones was one possibility. Wearing a blue sapphire thistle in one ear and a ruby thistle in the other was another. “Why Don't You order Schiaparelli's cellophane belt with your name and telephone number on it?” Diana asked, though quite why one should want to do such a thing was never explained. Some of Diana's fashion ideas were borrowed from Hollywood: “Try the effect of diamond roses and ribbons flat on top of your head, as Garbo wears them when she says good-bye to Armand in their country retreat,” she advised. But many sartorial suggestions drew directly on Mrs. Vreeland's grand social life in Europe and all her new friends there. “Why Don't You wear, like the Duchess of Kent, three enormous diamond stars arranged in your hair in front?” she wondered. If that did not appeal, one could copy Elsie de Wolfe. “Try Lady Mendl's thick black leather bracelets, which she wears just above the elbow with a huge diamond bracelet at the wrist.”

Diana did not, of course, confine herself to clothes. “Why Don't You have your bed made in China—the most beautiful bed imaginable, the head board and spread of yellow satin embroidered in butterflies?” If China was unrealistic, there were solutions nearer home. “Why Don't You bring back from Central Europe a huge white Baroque porcelain stove to stand in your front hall, reflected in the parquet?” she proffered. The authorial voice of the column could at times be rather strict: “Why Don't You reconsider the hopelessness of a room without a mantel, and put in a fake fireplace draped in flowered chintz and holding an urn of carnations?” If none of this appealed one could have a room done in every shade of green. “This will take months, years, to collect, but it will be delightful—a mélange of plants, green glass, green porcelains, and furniture covered in sad greens, gay greens, clear, faded and poison greens.” There was some shameless name-dropping. “Study closely the perfection of taste and amazing variety in the paneled boudoir of the Vicomtesse Charles de Noailles—buttoned brown satin, straw baskets and fruit, a Cranach, an engraving of Byron, a straw hat and exquisite objets d'art.” It was clear that Mrs. Vreeland was
au fait
with the ways of artists: “Why Don't You embroider enormous red lobsters on a pure heavy white silk tablecloth and mark it with a bright blue monogram? (Sacha Guitry has ordered one like this for his summer house).” She was quite a scholar too: “Put on a long lacquer table in your dressing room large leather boxes such as Voltaire might have used for papers—of tan leather etched in gold, lined in pink quilted taffeta and sachet and locking with a little bronze lock and key to keep your gloves, lingerie and artificial flowers within.”

Once the column was up and running, no part of the household was safe from Diana. Given the attention she paid to her own sons' outfits, it was not surprising that making children suitably decorative was a particular interest. “Why Don't You rinse your blond child's hair in dead champagne to keep its gold, as they do in France?” caused a certain amount of adult fuss, though from the point of view of the children, being made to look like little Tyrolean cowherds in high white-knitted Tyrolean socks was probably worse. And if Nanny thought she was going to avoid Mrs. Vreeland's critical gaze, she was wrong. “Why Don't You keep your nurse out of any uniform or veil in the park? The best English nannies wear gray flannel suits, white shirtwaists, black boots and white cotton gloves.” There was no escape for the dog either. “Put all your dogs in bright yellow collars and leads like all the dogs in Paris,” Diana advised. Indeed “Why Don't You?” addressed the fashionable life from almost every angle. It dealt with the giving of presents: “Why Don't You give to the wife of your favorite band leader an entire jazz band made of tiny bancette diamonds and cabochon emeralds in the form of a bracelet from Marcus?” It considered stylish smoking: “Why Don't You have your cigarettes stamped with a personal insignia, as a well-known explorer did with this penguin?” It touched on gardening: “Why Don't You start a topiary garden of box or yew and clip the bushes into peacocks and poodles?” And it certainly did not ignore Christmas: “Why Don't You ask for a Skye terrier?”

“They were all very tried and true ideas,” Diana said later, apropos of an elk-hide trunk for the back of one's car. “We had a trunk like that on the back of our Bugatti.” In 1936 she kept a notebook in which she jotted down ideas that then resurfaced in the column. “Millicent's ski coat . . . pink gold cuff links . . . wonderfull [
sic
] ski-coat like Italian truck drivers” became “For a coat to put on after ski-ing get yourself an Italian driver's coat, of red-orange lined in dark green.” A scribbled note on “little boys purple tweed” emerged as “Remember that little black-eyed boys look divine in bright purple tweed coats and velvet collars,” though it was perhaps for the best that a note to herself to “get that bandaged look” never saw the light of day. The notebook suggests that Diana was taking in ideas from everywhere. “Why Don't You?” appeared against the background of a surge of interest in surrealism in New York in late 1936, stimulated by a major surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Art. Diana joined in by putting earrings on the furniture: “Why Don't You give a new note to your sitting-room by introducing a Victorian chair upholstered by Jansen in bright emerald green cotton, buttoned in white with little white chenille earrings on either side?”

In late 1936 and 1937, when the column appeared most frequently, the United States was still recovering from the Wall Street crash and was teetering on the brink of another sharp recession. “Why Don't You?” was not, of course, impervious to the concept of thrift: “Why Don't You use a gigantic shell instead of a bucket to ice your champagne?” it suggested helpfully. Nonetheless, the idea that readers would enjoy being invited to install “a private staircase from your bedroom to the library with a needlework carpet with notes of music worked on each step—the whole spelling out your favorite tune” was counterintuitive. From the outset, however, “Why Don't You?” was a runaway success. Even Hearst was delighted. “I never met the old boy,” said Diana. “But once, when I'd just started writing ‘Why Don't You?' for
Harper's
Bazaar
, he sent me a note in his own hand: ‘Dear Miss Vreeland, It is always a pleasure to read your columns. I reread them all the time. I am a particular admirer of yours.' I was so touched. Don't you love the ‘Miss'?” The column was brilliantly served by Brodovitch's layouts, and Cecil Beaton had his own explanation for its popularity. “It can be seen that Mrs. Vreeland's column was directed towards an imaginary upper-income bracket in a magazine whose circulation was largely due to the average American woman. The psychology of this, however, was shrewd and appropriate. At the height of a depression, to list such things as fanciful as porcelain stoves brought back from Europe or beds from China gave the reader a feeling that a sentiment
de luxe
(and hence the perverse, the capricious) was still operating.”

Pace
Beaton,
Bazaar
's readers were sufficiently intelligent to realize they were not expected actually to implement Mrs. Vreeland's more grandiose plans. An obvious reason for the column's success was that it made the readers of
Bazaar
laugh. The yawning gap between its flights of fancy and everyday middle-class life was hilarious. Part of its appeal also lay in its chummy tone, as if one were being addressed by a rather grand and eccentric friend who was sure that you knew “Syrie” and “Lady Mendl” as well as she did, that you would be no more troubled by sweeping into Hermès for an elk-hide trunk than would Mrs. Harrison Williams, and that you were so slim, so busy, and so frequently at the dressmaker's that it made sense to “call up John Powers, the model agency, for a professional model” as a stand-in at $7.50 an hour. But the column also had a more subtle appeal. Descriptions of “Why Don't You?” have become so overwhelmed by dead champagne, porcelain stoves, and beds from China that it is easy to overlook the fact that Diana regularly included suggestions that cost next to nothing. Winkling them out was part of the column's charm to its readers. “Use eggplants complete with their green stalks in a bright yellow room. The effect is very Chinese and delicious,” was one suggestion in this vein. “Knit a little skullcap,” was another. “Why Don't You realize that everyone really hankers for a toothpick after a good meal, so have blatantly on your table quill toothpicks as you would have cigarettes?” was remarkably down-to-earth. So was “Whitewash a pair of old linen-closet steps and use on a porch with finger-bowls and jars full of flowers or as a child's bedside table for lamp, books and pencils.”

Less happily the column had one serious collision with politics. “Why Don't You wear bare knees and long white knitted socks as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the Carlton in Munich?” was held against Diana for decades afterward. It was a shocking lapse of judgment by someone who judged the world too much in terms of style and was as deaf to the dangers of fascism in 1936 as she had been in 1934 on the Night of the Long Knives. However, nothing appeared in
Bazaar
without Snow's express approval, and she would have excised this particular “Why Don't You?” if she had thought it noxious. Snow's liberal record at the time is otherwise good—she was fêted for publishing a photograph of the contralto Marian Anderson in the teeth of Hearst's racist objections as early as 1937. But in 1936 she was less sure-footed about fascism. Like Diana, and in common with many others in society, she was temporarily blinded by its glamour, permitting
Bazaar
to flirt with the idea of fascist chic in 1936 in a piece about “politically minded scarves” on sale in Henri Bendel in New York. The scarves were designed around Mussolini's signature; and in the same article there was a photograph of the star tenor Nino Martini, lifting “his admired and passionately Fascist face above a white silk variation of the same scarf.” But Snow seems to have realized that her intense and unending quest for the new had tripped her up, and that this was fraught territory: political fashion and Unity Mitford as style icon disappeared at the end of 1936 and did not appear again.

Even without fascism, “Why Don't You?” was all too much for
The
New Yorker
. The first parody appeared in February 1937, when writer Bett Hooper suggested that
Bazaar
combine the column with a rather startling article on how to look good with one's arm in a sling in a feature called “Fall Clothes”: “Why don't you give the first maid a black eye every morning before grapefruit? The time it takes for the bruise to spread is negligible, and the effect is startling against dull-gold breakfast-room drapes.” Just over a year later Diana was paid the compliment of a brilliant lampoon by the great New Yorker humorist S. J. Perelman, who fell upon the column with the air of a starving man at a banquet:

The first time I noticed this “Why Don't You” department was a year ago last August while hungrily devouring news of the midsummer Paris openings. Without any preamble came the stinging query “Why don't you rinse your blond child's hair in dead champagne, as they do in France? Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed, as they do in England?” After a quick look into the nursery, I decided to let my blond child go to hell in her own way, as they do in America. . . .

Whenever I got too near a newsstand bearing a current issue of the
Bazaar
and my head started to swim, I would rush home and bury myself in dress patterns. And then, one inevitable day, the dam burst. Lingering in Brentano's basement over
L'Illustration
and
Blanco y Negro,
I felt the delicious, shuddery, half-swooning sensation of being drawn into the orbit again. On a table behind me lay a huge stack of the very latest issue of
Harper's Bazaar,
smoking hot from the presses. . . . “Why don't you build beside the sea, or in the center of your garden, a white summer dining-room shaped like a tent, draped with wooden swags, with walls of screen and Venetian blinds, so you will be safe from bugs and drafts?” . . . “No, no!” I screamed. “I won't! I can't! Help!”

According to Diana, Snow reacted with concern to these send-ups, worrying that they might somehow damage her confidence. Snow even wrote to S. J. Perelman, telling him that it was upsetting for such a young girl to be criticized. “Good heavens!” said Diana, “I was in my thirties at the time and very flattered.” By April 1938, however, she was being asked to incorporate suggestions she disliked, such as, “Why Don't You discover a pair of cream-colored horses to drive you to the church, as did the Hon. Mrs. Reginald Fellowes for her daughter when she became the Comtesse de Castéja?” This “Why Don't You?” may have been inspired by one of the most stylish women in Europe, but it was the sort of costly but prosaic idea that missed the whole point of the column. The point, said Diana, was that “one could have fantasy . . . even if one did not have cash.” It was simply a question of being on the
qui vive
, and cultivating the imagination. “ ‘Why Don't You?' wasn't
totally
absurd to me,” Diana said later. “Of course, the columns had a certain absurdity that tickled people—just to think that anyone would think of writing anything so absurd. But it wasn't even writing. To me, writing—Edith Wharton, Henry James . . .
Proust
, for God's sake . . . is a thing of beauty and
sustainment
. ‘Why Don't You?' was a thing of fashion and fantasy, on the wing. . . . It wasn't writing, it was just
ideas.
It was me,
insisting
on people using their imaginations, insisting on a certain idea of luxury.”