Empress of Fashion (34 page)

Later Diana would be accused of being blinded by an obsession with youth, to
Vogue
's detriment. In 1967 her excitement about youthful fashion for everyone made sound commercial sense. “For [many] people,” writes the historian Alan Petigny, “identifying with youth culture eased the discomfort they felt toward the current state of American society. And because the world of adolescents was so tightly bound to consumption, millions of adults, flush with disposable income, were able to essentially shop for identity.” Diana's own view was that when it came to shopping, the most important thing in a woman was an adventurous attitude to her own potential. Every American woman would like to wake up one morning touched with the intoxicating mystery of the European woman, she wrote, but she also had a unique freedom to become her own person. “The fact is that the American woman, plunged by the accident of history into a unique situation, has—with a good lot of help from men—made herself up as she went along.”

D
riving her vision through twenty issues a year and making sure it never flagged was very hard work. Instructions to Diana's secretaries started by telephone from her bathroom at home from 7:30 a.m, though she rarely appeared in the office before late morning. (Down the years she had changed her mind about lunch. By the time she arrived at
Vogue
, Diana's lunch consisted of peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, coffee that was not too hot, ice cream that was not too cold, and a shot of Scotch. “I think people who lunch don't work,” said Diana in later life. “They're just lunchers.”) While staying in the bathroom each morning may sound like the last word in affectation, it gave Diana time to let her imagination, memory, and subconscious run free before entering the fray in the afternoons. Ideas dictated to
Vogue
's secretaries on the phone from early morning onward were circulated as interoffice memos by lunchtime, and were so idiosyncratic that they were frequently shoved into drawers for posterity. Diana's inspiration could come from anywhere. At least once, it came from the bathroom itself: “We really want beautiful bathrooms. We would like to call these bathing rooms.”

Sometimes ideas came from deep in Diana's past. Her teenage preoccupation with George Sand resurfaced and so did Isadora Duncan, brought to life—and suitably melodramatic death—in a film starring Vanessa Redgrave. She sent her colleagues back to Chanel's predilection for hair ribbons in the 1930s, and to Greta Garbo as Mata Hari in George Fitzmaurice's eponymous 1931 film. But for the most part Diana's hand was on the contemporary pulse. Cher had to be persuaded to take her makeup off: “There has to be a transparency, a gleam, a lightness and an amused expression or people look dead today and very old.” The staff really should read about Barbarella, “a lovely girl who spends a lot of time in space with a variety of types . . . her eye is never hard . . . in every way she has the upper hand through her imagination and vitality.” Close, close attention should be paid to serpents. “The serpent should be on every finger and all wrists . . . we cannot see enough of them.” Memos streamed in about colors: “Let's promote gray. For everything.” There was even an occasional foray into international politics: “Is there nobody in the village or slightly out of work or a poor old Arab who would make us some passamenterie[
sic
] ornamental belts? . . . Let's give the Arabs a boost, they are very down in the mouth because of the war.”

Some of the memos were matter-of-fact and practical. Why had no one been to Oscar de la Renta's last show? Why was no one using Britt Ekland (a Swedish actress then married to Peter Sellers) as a model? Was everyone aware that with health, a good figure, and tanned skin no one need spend much on summer clothes in 1969? Diana was always conscious that
Vogue
's support for stylish trends could be damaging to the fashion industry's craftspeople and was anxious about it. “I am strong for the shawl, the poncho, the toga what-have-you,” she wrote in a memo on November 20, 1969. “BUT. We must not cut in on the coat market. First of all we will lose the workers and there are very few tailors left and they must have the encouragement.”

The memos constantly nipped and barked at editors in a battle to keep standards from slipping. Hair was a particularly sore point: “I think it is essential that you all re-think these terrible looking curls next to the face . . . we agreed long ago that they looked dipped in salad oil.” Richard Avedon and Polly Mellen received a broadside on this subject too. “I do believe that these pieces of hair dipped in salad oil and then draped up on top of the head is the most horrible thing that has hit hairdressing. . . . It goes completely against the knuckle. . . . It is poverty stricken and horrible.” Lack of editorial interest in Givenchy's new leg paint annoyed her intensely: “I think it is curious that none of you have taken up with this colored paint because it is very amusing and projects a mood.” Freckles were another source of irritation: “I am extremely disappointed that no one has taken the slightest interest in freckles on the models. . . . I heartily suggest that we get going as soon as possible on this delicious coquetry.” And again on May 12, 1969: “Are we using freckles? Don't forget them.” Pamela Colin, who was American
Vogue
's editor in London, sometimes found herself at the wrong end of memos from Diana, who thought that London was seething with revolutionary new ideas and implied that Colin must simply be missing them: “We must have the moods, this is why we have outer offices.”

In 1968 Meriel McCooey, a well-known fashion editor herself, celebrated Diana in London's
Sunday Times
. “There are only a handful of magazines left that create fashion as well as report it,” she wrote. “American
Vogue
is one and as its Editor-in-Chief, Diana Vreeland still has the power to alter or transform clothes if she thinks fit, or even invent them if they don't exist.” Diana was one of the last great activists, wrote McCooey; she was a woman who was employed for her intuition about fashion and her flair, who stamped her opinions on every page, even if they were sometimes eccentric. “ ‘I saw her at her desk one day, and I couldn't believe my eyes,' said a girl who worked on
Vogue
. ‘She was wearing a pearl and a gold Chanel earring on one ear, and a ruby and diamond on the other. I thought she was getting absent-minded but it was a fashion she'd just thought up.' ” Diana had not of course just thought this up—she had proposed it in “Why Don't You?” thirty years earlier, but neither the girl who worked on
Vogue
nor Meriel McCooey was to know. “Her gift, if that's what it is, might be called the reverse of restraint,” said McCooey. “Half the clothes she shows are unwearable. . . . But she sticks to the principle present in all her work—which is to lead the way with breathtaking fantasy, so that less emphatic women can adapt it to suit themselves.”

M
cCooey's article appeared at a high point of Diana's career at
Vogue
. But 1968, the year in which it was published, was marked by unprecedented turbulence and an increasingly dark mood. The year began with the violence and destruction unleashed by the Tet Offensive; the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4 provoked riots across the United States; demonstrations and student protest brought everyday life to a halt in many places, including Diana's beloved Paris and, closer to home, at Columbia University. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5; antiwar protest surged again as troop numbers in Vietnam reached the half million mark; at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August, Mayor Richard Daley's police beat up demonstrators in full view of the television cameras; and Richard Nixon was elected president in November, only four years after Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory. The long U.S. economic boom of the sixties ended with a recession in 1969 that lasted more than a year, caused a rise in unemployment, and had an immediate impact on consumer spending that coincided with a hippy-influenced reaction against materialism. During 1969 the utopian ambience of the so-called Summer of Love gave way to a much darker atmosphere. The Vietnam War, already highly divisive, sunk to a new low with revelations about the massacre at My Lai. For all the peace and harmony of the Woodstock festival in August 1969, the violent, ugly mood was crystallized by the killing of a man at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, in December. The extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia in 1970, and the deaths of protesting students, first at Kent State University in Ohio and then at Jackson State in Mississippi, sounded the death knell for 1960s optimism as the idealism of the Summer of Love simply evaporated.

Articles in
Vogue
that addressed the great political issues of the day were few and far between. Three articles about Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald that appeared in 1967 were the exception rather than the rule. Diana was fascinated by Frances FitzGerald's family, the Trees, but this does not account for her decision to publish FitzGerald's work, since she was ruthless about rejecting material from celebrities even when they were friends. The explanation lies rather in FitzGerald's approach, and her brilliant characterization (which, though deeply political, did not appear to be) of the pervasive unreality of the war, which caused soldiers, press, and Vietnam to startle at phantoms. “The Americans have created Viet Nam anew. With language they have fashioned a country called ‘Viet Nam' out of the original chaos, a country which bears no simple relation to the country that the Vietnamese live in. Like all such constructions, ‘Viet Nam' describes the shape of its creator's mind,” she wrote. It was more usual for politics to appear in the pages of
Vogue
as a new style key, eviscerating the original political impulse. As Grace Mirabella put it: “Black nationalism was wonderful afros and models wearing dashikis. Third World-ism was girls in djellabas and harem pants, rajah coats and Nehru jackets.” Later Diana put it differently. “You read revolution in clothes,” she said. “You read everything in clothes. That's why clothes are interesting.”

At the time, however, her instinct as editor in chief of
Vogue
was to bat the darker side of the Sixties away from its pages, and to position its dreamworld as an antidote to controversy and turmoil. In at least one “People Are Talking About” column, in June 1965, this was quite explicit. “People Are Talking About . . . Anything to ease thinking about the two subjects on everyone's mind: Vietnam and ‘the Negro Revolution.' ” Instead, proposed
Vogue
, the reader should focus attention on the pleasures of “the eruption of the young in every field—the young, no longer the silent generation but the generation committed, concerned and loquacious.” Examples included, in this instance, a selection that was random even by Diana's standards: Peter Beard and his book of African animals; “a bleak, perspiring British singer” called Tommy Steele; George Balanchine; and Petula Clark.

In 1969 she responded to the darkening skies outside the Graybar Building by invoking more vigorously than ever the power of fantasy. One idea that prevailed in
Vogue
in 1969 was the Gypsy look, which bore no relation to any real Gypsy, dead or alive, but seemed to imply that the best solution to the world's problems was to turn one's back on it all and take to the open road looking fabulous. Avedon photographed another of Diana's favorites, Anjelica Huston, in a Gypsy caravan in Ireland. Jean Shrimpton modeled Gypsy-inspired garments that included a fringed suede shawl by Joan Kavanagh, worn over brown plush pants. “To roam the earth and know the secrets of the world—to be a Gypsy—to look like a Gypsy, dress like a Gypsy, to move with the splendid freedom and vitality of the Gypsy—is suddenly everybody's dream,” said
Vogue
. By mid-1970
Vogue
was channeling Fleetwood Mac. “You go your own way. And you change your own way . . . one day you paint big orange apples on your cheeks and wrap yourself up in a silk shawl with Chinese embroidery and thick knotted fringe . . . and the next day you're swinging down the street in tweeds and brolly and wrinkly suède boots . . . you've only to give your imagination a little push.”

From the end of 1969, however, this sort of fashion was being challenged from several directions at once. There was loud indignation from long-standing readers of
Vogue
who were maddened by not being able to find clothes featured in the magazine in the stores; and a chorus of complaints from those who felt that neither “fantasy” nor “do your own thing” was right for them. Ann Bonfoey Taylor was one of them, and she went to the length of visiting Diana in her office in November 1970 to make her views known. An adventurous and beautiful society woman, Taylor had been a member of the U.S. Women's Ski Team when she was younger. She designed ski clothes that featured in
Bazaar
in the 1940s until her marriage to Vernon Taylor, Jr., and then acquired an exceptional wardrobe of couture clothes by such designers as Balenciaga and Givenchy. The main thrust of Mrs. Vernon Taylor's objections, which were tape-recorded by Rosemary Blackmon, was the lack of fashion direction from
Vogue
. “It's all very confusing to do our own thing . . . ,” Taylor complained. “I think it is asking too much. Too much time, too much shopping, too much trouble for the ordinary woman.” The styles in
Vogue
were for the young, she objected, but the young looked beautiful in anything, and there were other times in a woman's life when she wanted to look good, in clothes that were suitable for everyday life. “How can life be possible without fantasy?” asked Diana. “The average woman has to be practical about it, Diana,” said Ann Taylor. “It's confusing, now everything is a masquerade, and we can't wear our masquerade clothes to the supermarket.”