Empress of Fashion (36 page)

For her part Diana saw womankind heading in a quite different direction. “In my opinion in the year 2001 so many physical problems will have been surmounted that a woman's beauty will be a dream that will be completely obtainable,” said Diana to Carol Phillips in 1967. Controlling the figure would no longer be a problem, and all the difficulties caused by “the various feminine rhythms” would have been resolved. So what would a woman do with her time? “It will then amuse and entertain her to paint herself as if she was a heathen idol,” said Diana. “Imitating and creating anew each time she wishes to step into the world into her room or wherever it is that she is amusing herself to be.” Alongside the body painting, Diana predicted a seriously punishing bathing routine. “She will probably bathe three or four times a day as she will be very conscious of keeping herself in a completely exhilarated invigorated state and very much Diane de Poitiers and will probably take three cold baths a day.” Freedom from so many constraints would give women far more time for beauty, as well as time to be busy and productive. The two, thought Diana, went hand in hand. “The future holds a golden world. . . . It will be for beauty it will be for intelligent productiveness.”

For the first time in her professional life Diana misread a profound cultural and economic shift. Whether she liked it or not, one powerful consequence of the Youthquake was a new generation of young women, educated as never before, who were aiming for professional careers, not four baths a day. These middle- and upper-class young women in their late twenties and early thirties were no longer spending “clothes-dollars” dished out by men, but earning their own and wanting clothes that were suitable for professional lives. Instead of embracing this new trend, however, these powerful young women made Diana uneasy. Implicitly at least, she had always made a distinction between women who were “clever” and educated, and readers of
Vogue
. Most of
Vogue
's readers, she contended to Ann Taylor, did not read a word of it. Fashion was a visual world, and
Vogue
's readers were inspired by its images, not its text. “I mean [at
Vogue
], we're asked to help, we're asked to direct by people who are fashion conscious.” Such people were creative, people with an imaginative spark in contrast to the intellectual genius of, say, a distinguished anthropologist like Margaret Mead. She did not need
Vogue
, Diana maintained to Ann Taylor. “She's got two washed dresses and is the most brilliant woman in the country.”

It was the conservatism of the younger generation that Diana disliked more than anything. When educated young women came to work at the magazine she frequently felt that all the pizzazz had been drilled out of them. Her unease about this was reflected in the manner in which
Vogue
presented Frances FitzGerald to readers alongside her article about the people of Vietnam in May 1967. Frances FitzGerald was “disarmingly pretty” and she was certainly educated: “Magna Cum Laude Radcliffe '62,” but she was “exacting in her facts and her purposes . . . [and] has caught what the American college woman often only chases after, an independent, creative mind.” In contrast with FitzGerald the young college women who came to work at
Vogue
were not only dull but astonishingly ignorant: “They've been to the best schools, and they have never heard of Anna Karenina; they don't know whether you're talking about a brand of toothpaste, or what.”

Diana found it difficult to connect with a construction of the female self that was not primarily driven by style, seemed unable to understand that young women earning their own money had to be careful about how they spent it, and was baffled by the idea that they regarded making themselves alluring during the working day as the least of their worries. Rather than understand that unadventurous but versatile clothes were essential for women making inroads into new socioeconomic territory, Diana thought the modern woman had retreated back to dismal American conformism. “She never wants to be first. . . . Safe from what! Nobody knows. But safe.” Could she not help such women by telling them how to look good in a sweater and skirt rather than dressed up as a Gypsy? asked Ann Taylor. But Diana had a different solution. Conservative women should express themselves with an überconservative fashion look like that of the 1950s: “They would probably look perfectly delightful as it would suit them and suit their dispositions.”

B
y the autumn of 1970 Diana's failure to sense new moods mattered. The September 1, 1970, issue of
Vogue
misfired badly with a prominent spread created by Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, who styled some of the new season's American designs on models dressed up as Native Americans. Instead of striking an imaginative and witty note this looked ridiculous, passé, and insensitive, since Native American poverty was already a live political issue. As usual Mainbocher and Norell were spared such treatment with more conventional spreads, but the veteran American designer Adele Simpson, who was also an advertiser, is said to have hated the styling of her clothes so much that she refused to allow
Vogue
to photograph them again. There was an air of strain and unease about the issue more generally, and it was forced onto the defensive about furs. But Diana pushed on in her own romantic direction. The silhouette of the Girl of late 1970, she wrote in one memo, “can easily be compared with the moyen age heroines such as Queen Guinevere and Tennyson's Lady of Shallott [
sic
].” In early 1971 Diana saw her in the hippy-chic of the beautiful Talitha Getty as she flitted around the world wearing mirrored dresses, fisherwomen's lace caps, and a wreath of green leaves, before dying of a drug overdose a short time later. Even before this,
Vogue
's readers were begging to differ in significant numbers. In the face of recession, an antifashion mood underscored by feminist characterization of high style as the enemy, and a feeling that the clothes in
Vogue
were simply irrelevant to their lives, they stopped buying the magazine. As readers deserted, advertisers took fright.
Vogue
was not alone in suffering falling revenues:
Bazaar
also suffered badly. But
Vogue
's losses became catastrophic. In the first three months of 1971, Condé Nast's flagship publication suffered a 38 percent drop in advertising, and in the rush for cover, the blame was laid firmly at Diana's door.

Her supporters fell away. She had already alienated many on Seventh Avenue. “What is the name of that designer who hates me so?” she once asked. “Legion,” Nicky de Gunzburg replied. For every Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, there were many who were up in arms about her approach. Some, like Norman Norrell, had long mistrusted her. Others were alienated by her refusal to attend their openings, and her much-vaunted scorn for Seventh Avenue “cookie cutter” clothes. June Weir, fashion editor of
WWD
at the time, has cautioned about overstating the extent to which the ire of designers was aimed solely at Diana: “They were always complaining, whatever one did.” Oscar de la Renta sometimes objected to the way his designs were styled in the late 1960s, yet his friendship with Diana remained intact. But Babs Simpson recalled that by 1971 many designers and manufacturers were genuinely furious, so angry that at least one of them only admitted her to his building by a back elevator because she was from
Vogue
. Carol Phillips thought that, consciously or not, the depth of their anger was caused by Diana's warm embrace of “do whatever” because such radicalism posed a danger to Seventh Avenue by passing decision-making power to the consumer. Diana was blamed for sensing a much wider trend, one that undermined the cosy complicity between the fashion press, designers, and manufacturers who could no longer rely on turning a profit each season by ganging up and telling women what to wear. “In a funny way, it [led] to the destruction of the fashion industry,” said Phillips.

Internal support leached away too. Even colleagues who admired Diana began to feel she was losing touch, that “do whatever” was dictatorial in its own way, and that her view of fashion had had its day. Others, like Babs Simpson, had already been ranged against her for longer, believing that Diana had begun brilliantly but was drunk on self-importance, had gotten much too far ahead of the readers, and was “trashing” the magazine. There were some, of course, who had felt the rough end of Diana's tongue too often and had no urge to defend her. Diana had never been easy to work for even when things were going well. “
Vogue
was high drama, amateur theater. Everyone was trying to be ‘adventurous' and ‘amusing' and ‘Up . . . up . . . up!' to please Vreeland,” wrote Grace Mirabella, who adored Diana once she came to know her. But this made for a less than pleasant environment as editors jostled for favor. The atmosphere at run-throughs, as Lauren Hutton had noticed, could be horrible. As the pressure grew, Diana became more ferocious, inconsistent, and arbitrary. She fired one otherwise competent young woman for having a clumping, noisy walk. (“She should have taken more
care
, George,” she told Plimpton.) When staff members started to complain about her behavior, Liberman attempted to hold editorial meetings, but they became a shambles. “She wouldn't listen or she'd go off on some subject.” She was often fascinating, said Liberman, but that was not the point.

A
s the American economy contracted, Seventh Avenue manufacturers began to lose money and the cost of Diana's working habits became another bone of contention. Diana's behavior in Paris during the collections was a particularly sore point. She dismissed the idea of working out of the
Vogue
offices in the place du Palais Bourbon, and set herself up in a hotel as Carmel Snow had always done. But in Diana's case it was a matter of converting her suite in the Hôtel de Crillon into an office, complete with furniture and half a dozen special phone lines, with enough space for Susan Train, her assistant, and Diana's own secretaries. “You never had any peace,” said Carrie Donovan. “But imagine the expense. The expense was wild.” To make matters worse, Diana increasingly went to see only the collections of Paris couturiers she admired, refusing to do otherwise simply to please the business side of Condé Nast.

Moreover, her inventive fantasies had always been expensive. Motivating the fashion industry did not come cheap. Mirabella wrote: “Inventing a look like . . . ‘Scheherazade' meant drawing up a Concept, finding fabric swatches, commissioning the clothes, working out the accessories and hair with all the different fashion editors, dress rehearsing the look in the office, sometimes with the actual model, and Polaroiding it, so that every detail would be absolutely perfect on the day of the sitting.” Shoots became more dangerous as Diana's ideas grew wilder. One involved Babs Simpson, John Cowan, Ara Gallant, and two models, who went by helicopter to photograph evening dresses on top of a mountain peak in the Andes. Cowan was determined to make it look as if the models were floating in the clouds. At five o'clock, when the helicopter pilot told them it was unsafe to stay any longer, Cowan insisted on staying to get what he wanted. The helicopter took off, abandoning the
Vogue
party on the top of the mountain. The team spent the night on the mountain huddled under Maximilian furs. “The next morning they found the Peruvian army waiting, absolutely furious, and pointing to the ground,” Mirabella recalled. “It was covered with mountain lion tracks.”

There is no doubt that some of Diana's character traits worked against her as the pressure grew. Carrie Donovan was one of Diana's great admirers who felt the turbulence acutely in the fall of 1970. She was so concerned about the way Condé Nast's executives were attempting to build a case against Diana behind her back that she asked to meet her for lunch. But Diana's long-standing habit of not listening to what she did not want to hear meant that she cut Donovan short. Insofar as she did react, she batted away Donovan's concerns by saying that it was all part of the job: “ ‘Oh, I know how to handle those boys. You just get tougher than they are,' which is what she had been doing for a whole year,” said Donovan.

When criticism from Condé Nast's executives became impossible to ignore, there was nothing in Diana's character that enabled her to deal with it strategically. Instead she reverted to the ways she had evolved in childhood. She exiled herself from the problem, shut her office door, and sat with a trusted colleague like Grace Mirabella, soothing herself with a tale of something beautiful, and moving to her secret inner world, the kind of world she was constantly entreating
Vogue
's readers to make for themselves. “
Her
world,” she observed of a girl in a Sargent painting:

She has created it for herself, it is real for herself—and therefore real to us . . . as we believe in the world of Alain-Fournier's
Le Grand Meaulnes
—a world which we know, in fact, to be no larger than a tiny French village—but a world so fully imagined by its author and so deeply realized that it becomes seductively real, vast and borderless: the world of the romantic. . . . It is for you to discover for yourself, within yourself—within the silent, green-cool groves of an inner world where, alone and free, you may dream the
possible
dream: that the wondrous is real, because that is how you feel it to be, that is how you wish it to be . . . and how you wish it into being.

Mirabella, who describes herself as loving Diana with a schoolgirl crush, became increasingly alarmed by Diana's tendency to retreat into her own “silent, green-cool groves” as the real world grew more hostile. “I used to beg her to go before Alex and Si Newhouse and speak her piece. Because I knew that there was an inner logic to Vreeland's apparent chaos. I knew that she had clear visions and solid plans. I also knew that Alex Liberman, for all his new talk about money, knew absolutely nothing about the business of running
Vogue
,” she said. But Diana refused to do it.